

























COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 






» 










t 








STRAIGHT 

ANSWERS 

TO 

LIFE QUESTIONS 











STRAIGHT 

ANSWERS 

TO 

LIFE QUESTIONS 


COPELAND SMITH 
at the 

Microphone 



WILLETT, CLARK & COLBY 

440 South Dearborn Street, Chicago 
200 Fifth Avenue, New York 
1928 



COPYRIGHT, 1928 , BY WILLETT, CLARK & COLBY 


T3V4SOI 
,S£,4 5 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


SEP 10 1928 

©Cl A1053689 


TO 


MODIE J. SPIEGEL 

FRIEND AND FELLOW-WORKER 



CONTENTS 

A word from the publishers 

What are people thinking about—wondering about— 
questioning? A book which reveals that, or part of that, 
is a book which reaches into the hearts of people. 

In examining the manuscript of this book, we were 
greatly impressed with the variety of questions raised 
and with the wide range of their source. The questions 
came from many sections of the country; from Protes¬ 
tant, Catholic and Jew; from white and black, old and 
young, men and women, boys and girls, rich and poor. 
They came from all walks of life: the professions, busi¬ 
ness, home; from married, unmarried; from fathers, 
mothers, sons and daughters. 

Chiefly, these questions came from people with serious 
purpose, seeking enlightenment on some perplexing prob¬ 
lem—some question of personal religion, personal con¬ 
duct as to the right and wrong of this or that; some 
question of politics, of state, of health; some question of 
what to think, how to behave, what to do. 

Quite evidently the questioners were looking to a 
source of help not easily available except through this 
Question Box conducted by Copeland Smith. As re¬ 
markable, to us, as the range and nature of these ques¬ 
tions is the rare human understanding shown by 
Copeland Smith in answering them. There seems to be 


A WORD FROM THE PUBLISHERS 


magic in his ability to get behind the outward expression 
of the questioner into the very heart of the problem lead¬ 
ing to the question. 

Without being weak or flabby, he becomes sympa¬ 
thetic; if he has occasion to speak straight out, he does 
so firmly but kindly. He gives help where help is needed, 
for he understands the fact that there is a problem within 
the question. 

And so it seems to us that these questions and answers, 
which have been given over the radio, should be made 
available in this collected and permanent form for the 
many who will find help or enlightenment in these pages. 

The Publishers. 



CONTENTS 


IS THE WORLD GETTING BETTER?.1 

Question: How does the world view religion today? Would you 
say that the world is becoming more or less religious? 

WHAT IS TRUTH?.2 

Question: In view of conflicting interpretations put upon Scripture 
and the differing versions of the meaning of life that are offered us 
everywhere, what is truth? 

EDUCATION VS. RELIGION.3 

Question: In view of the mounting crime statistics, don’t you think 
that more education, instead of more religion, is needed to improve the 
world ? 

THE HABIT OF DISLIKING.4 


Question: I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I am getting into 
a “disliking” mood. I find myself disliking folk and disliking more 
of their peculiarities. The thing is getting dangerous because I dislike 
more and more of the things that my own children do and even the 
things that my husband does—if not my husband himself. What am 
I to do about it? 


INSURANCE AND ASSURANCE.5 

Question: Do you think it right to insure our lives? What is the 
difference between insuring one’s life and insuring one’s property? 

ROOMING-HOUSE PROBLEMS. 6 

Question: From a Christian rooming-house keeper. What am I to do 
when good, but ignorant, girls from the country want to have male 
friends in their bedrooms; good girls who do not always understand, 
however, why I think that is undesirable? 

METHODIST AND CONFORMIST.8 

Question: Why were the Methodists called by that name? What 
is a Non-conformist? 

WHAT ARE THOUGHTS?.8 

Question: Are our thoughts simply bodily activities or do some of 
them have their source in our spiritual natures? 

THE MEANING OF GOING TO THE ALTAR.9 

Question: Do you believe that a man can obtain the spirit of God by 
just coming forward and giving his hand to the preacher at the altar? 

SOUL, SPIRIT AND MIND.10 

Question: What is the difference between “soul” and “spirit;” be¬ 
tween “mind” and “spirit” ? 

HOW TO READ THE NEW TESTAMENT.11 

Question: What advice about the intelligent reading of the New Testa¬ 
ment would you give to a business woman who has little time to spare 
but does earnestly wish to read her Testament with enjoyment and 
profit? 

DOES CRIME PAY?.13 


Question: The street cars have very attractive advertisements show¬ 
ing a very handsome policeman arresting a very poor-looking criminal 
and entitled, “You Can’t Win.” If this were true, the advertisement 
would be unnecessary. Government figures show that only 20% of the 
crimes are discovered. How can it be true that “You cant win”? 














CONTENTS 


THE TRINITY. 

Question: You remember Jesus said, “The Father judgeth no man 
but hath committed all judgment unto the Son.” Now, if Jesus is to 
judge mankind ... and if he is the creator of all things and 
powers as St. Paul claimed, is he not the only God? 

IS GANDHI A CHRISTIAN?.. 

Question: How do you account for the fact that through the in¬ 
fluence of Gandhi, the Hindu, and by his methods, he has been the 
medium through which a great deal of interest in Christ has come and 
that, through Gandhi, India's program has become one of soul-force 
instead of armed rebellion? Does this not indicate that there is a 
danger of putting merely moral folk on a plane with Christianity of 
the full and definite kind? 


WHAT IS PARADISE?.15 

Question: You said, last week, that the word Paradise had a long 
and interesting history, which you had no time to tell then. Have 
you time now? How much do you know, anyhow? Give us the 
history. 

CAN WE PROVE FAITH?.16 

Question: If we have no way of verifying our faith until after death, 
why should we try to influence other people’s religion, lest in doing 
so we possibly become responsible for their error? 

THE KINGDOM BOTH IN AND AMONGST US.17 

Question: To whom did Jesus speak in Luke 17 the 21st verse? 

Did he say that the Kingdom of God was within them or among them? 

IS THE BOOK OF JOB BIOGRAPHY?.18 

Question: Do you regard the Book of Job as biography or as pure 
drama? 

SIN—NOTORIOUS AND COVERED.19 

Question: What does I Timothy, chapter 5, verse 24 mean when it 
says that some men’s sins go before unto judgment? 

IMPORTUNITY IN PRAYER.19 

Question: In Luke’s Gospel, chapter 18, Christ likens God to an 
unjust judge. What does this mean? 

JESUS AND HIS MOTHER.21 

Question: Why did Jesus treat his mother with so much indifference 
in public life? 

WHAT DOES SELAH MEAN?.22 

Question: Would you mind telling me what the word “Selah” at the 
end of some of the verses of the Psalms means? Has it any modern 
significance? 

IS FREEMASONRY CHRISTIAN?.22 

Question: Is the Masonic Lodge a Christian organization? There 
are hosts of men belonging to this lodge who never enter a church 
nor do they profess Christianity. 

ARE ILLEGITIMATE BABIES DAMNED?.23 

Question: Would you teach that the fact that a man and woman are 
unmarried makes their offspring a baby damned from its birth—as so 
many try to teach? 


AN OBSTINATE HUSBAND AND FATHER.24 

Question: I don’t want to risk, in any way, the fine confidence which 
this troubled lady has placed in me. So I have not stated her ques¬ 
tion. You must read between the lines. 
















CONTENTS 


CAN DIVORCED FOLK BE SAVED?.26 

Question: I have been in bed for eleven weeks with tuberculosis. I 
am so thankful for the radio and wish every home could know about 
your Question Box. I am worried by this question: Can a person who 
has been divorced and remarried ever be saved? I was divorced from a 
man not fit to live with. 

BEING A GOOD SOLDIER OF JESUS CHRIST.27 

Question: What do you understand Paul to mean in Second Epistle 
to Timothy, second chapter, and twelfth verse, when he says, “If we 
endure, we shall also reign with him. If we deny him, he will also 
deny us.” 

TRANSUBSTANTIATION .27 

Question: Do the verses in St. John’s Gospel, chapter six and verses 
52-58, give any warrant for believing in the Transubstantiation of the 
elements in the Holy Communion? 

WHAT IS THE LORD’S SUPPER?.29 

Question: What is the difference between the teaching of the Lu¬ 
theran churches and that of the Roman church regarding the Eucharist? 
Would you, at the same time, mind stating your own view? 

IS THE POPE CHRIST’S VICAR?.30 

Question: Do you believe that the Pope of Rome is the representative 
of Jesus Christ on earth? 

BIRTH CONTROL.30 

Question: What is your view concerning birth control? 

WILL THE WORLD BECOME ROMAN CATHOLIC?.35 

Question: Do you think the whole world will ever become Roman 
Catholic or do you think the moral influence of the Catholic church has 
failed to register? What constructive policy do you favor for Protes¬ 
tants, many of whom admit a waning of popular interest in their 
churches? I am a member of no church, though I criticise no man for 
his church affiliations and ask these questions in all sincerity. 

ROMAN CATHOLICISM AND THE HIGH CHURCH PARTY.38 

Question: What, in the main, are the distinctions between the Anglo- 
Catholic and Roman Catholic Churches? Do they both recognize the 
infallibility of the Pope? 

WHAT IS MEEKNESS?.39 

Question: Jesus said, Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the 
earth. What did he mean by “meek”? 

INVOKING THE AID OF THE SAINTS.40 

Question: Where is the Biblical authority for Catholics invoking the 
help of the Virgin in their praying. My husband, who is a Catholic, 
does this and I argue with him against it. 

VERACITY OF THE GOSPELS.42 

Question: How can we be sure that Jesus actually spoke the words 
attributed to him in the Gospels? 

WAS THE WORLD ROMAN CATHOLIC UNTIL LUTHER?.43 

Question: Is it true that Peter was the first Pope of Rome and that 
the whole world was Roman Catholic until Martin Luther? 

PETER’S DENIAL AND JUDAS’ BETRAYAL.44 

Question: What made Peter deny Christ and what made Judas be¬ 
tray him ? 

THAT YOUNGER GENERATION.45 

Question: What do you think of the increasing attention to dress 
that seems to characterize the younger generation? 

















CONTENTS 


SHOULD PARENTS BE STRICT?. 

Question: I am the mother of a son and daughter and am many times 
perplexed just to know how strict to be, so as to retain their love and 
respect, and still have a high standard for their good. Don’t you think 
it is a much more difficult task to bring up young people in the way 
of right today than it was twenty-five years ago? 

MANY PORTRAITS OF CHRIST.... 

Question: Are there not two portraits of Jesus in the Gospels; one of 
them, the portrait in the first three Gospels of a man who spent his life, 
going about doing good; and the other portrait, that of John’s Gospel, 
of a supernatural Christ? Which is the true one? 

THAT DREADFUL YOUNGER GENERATION. 

Question: How can you say that the world is getting better in view 
of what we know about the younger generation? 

ABSOLUTION . 

Question: What does the 23rd verse of the twentieth chapter of Saint 
John mean when it makes Jesus say: whosesoever sins ye remit, they 
are remitted, and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained? 

CAN A CATHOLIC BE PRESIDENT?. 

Question: Can a man who is a Roman Catholic become the Presi¬ 
dent of these United States? 

CAN MURDERERS BE SAVED?.. 

Question: Taking young Hickman for an example, do you think the 
terrible crime he recently committed is any worse in the eyes of God 
than any other breaking of the Ten Commandments? If this boy 
would simply give his heart to Christ cannot he stand as good a chance 
of gaining a home in Heaven as any saint who ever lived? 

THE COLORED MAN’S BURDEN.. 

Question: Why does the present generation of white people hate the 
present generation of Negroes? What can the present generation of 
Negroes do to remove this hate? 

RELIGION AND MORAL CONCEPTS. 

Question: Do our religious conceptions really matter as a basis for 
conduct? Cannot a man do right without having right thoughts 
about God? 

WHERE ARE THE DEAD?. 

Question: According to your understanding of the Bible, where are 
the dead, that is, those who have died in Christ: are they in Heaven 
with the angelic hosts or are they asleep until the time of Christ’s 
second coming? 

UNBELIEF AND DISBELIEF. 

Question: Do you see any difference between Un-Belief in the Scrip¬ 
tures and Dis-Belief? 

ARE PRAYERS ANSWERED?. 

Question: My experience is that prayers are not answered. In what 
way can we assure ourselves that sincere, worth while prayers will 
be answered? 

WHAT IS PERFECTION?. 

Question: What did Jesus mean in the Sermon on the Mount, when 
he said, “Ye, therefore, shall be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is 
perfect?” There does not seem to be any standard of comparison by 
which the Father and ourselves can be compared. 

WERE THE BROTHERS OF JESUS UNFRIENDLY?. 

Question: Kindly explain Matthew, chapter XIII and verse 55; also 
Mark, chapter VI and verse 3. Any Roman Catholic that I have 


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CONTENTS 


spoken to on the subject says that our Lord’s Mother was always a 
virgin. Now, if she had four other sons, as the above verses lead me 
to believe, why did our Lord when on the cross give her over to the 


care of John who was not one of her sons? 

FREE WILL AND OMNISCIENCE.66 

Question: How do you explain the theory of an omnipotent Cod and 
man’s free will? The best explanation I have heard so far is that we 
cannot hope to understand such a confusing question in this life. 

HOW SHOULD WE FEAR GOD?.67 

Question: Why should we fear God? 

HAS A STILL-BORN BABY A SOUL?.68 

Question: Has a still-born baby a soul? 

GOD’S METHOD OF FORGIVENESS.69 


Question: Would you say it is a divine law that unless we forgive, 
we cannot expect God’s forgiveness? Did Paul state God’s method 
of forgiveness when he said in Ephesians, chapter IV and verses 26 
and 28, we were to be angry but sin not? Does the first chapter of 


Isaiah and the eighteenth verse, where God says, “Though your sins 
be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” indicate that all sin is 
forgiven by return to God? 

IS H. L. MENCKEN GOOD FOR US?.70 

Question: What do you think is the influence of H. L. Mencken in 
the life of America? Is it good or bad? 

CHRIST AND THE PSALMS. 71 

Question: I find a resemblance between the words of Christ on the 
Cross and the 22nd Psalm. Am I justified in thinking there is any 
resemblance ? 

DOES BROADCASTING HURT RELIGION?.71 

Question: Does not the broadcasting of Sunday morning services tend 
to have a serious and harmful effect on the congregations where broad¬ 
casting is not practised and thus become harmful to religion? 

BROADCASTING RELIGION A SIGN OF REVIVAL.73 

Question: Do you believe that the preaching of the Gospel by radio 
is a favorable or an unfavorable sign of the times? 

AMERICA’S FIVE GREATEST PREACHERS.75 

Question: Who were the five greatest preachers that the United 
States have produced ? 

FUNDAMENTALISTS AND MODERNISTS.76 

Question: What are the real points of difference between the Funda¬ 
mentalists and the Modernists? 

CHRISTIANITY NOT A SET OF PROHIBITIONS.76 

Question: Can you discuss for us the Truth in “Dowieism” as 
preached and practised at Zion, Illinois? It prohibits the use of pork 
products, oysters, doctors, drugs, on a basis of Christian ethics; also 
vaccination. How could they ignore a state or county order on small 
pox, scarlet fever, etc. ? 

THE ELEPHANT AND FIVE BLIND MEN.77 


Question: Your expressions on Modernism and Fundamentalism given 
over the radio this afternoon struck me as coming from one who was 
bursting with ego; whose mind, when expressed, was final. Am I 
right? 

THE WISE MEN AND THE STAR.78 

Question: Will you tell me the names of the three Wise Men who 
discovered the Star? 
















CONTENTS 


SUNDAY MOVIES. 

Question: Have you seen that a majority of the citizens of my town 
have voted for Sunday movies? If so, do you think this is right? 
Can you give a “Yes” or “No” answer? 

SUNDAY AND SABBATH... 

Ouestion: I am a Christian believer though I belong to no particular 
denomination. Being a shut-in, I depend very much on your services 
and your interpretations. Here is a question that has much pre- 
plexed me: Is Sunday the Sabbath which God intends Christians to 
keep? If so, how can I prove it? 


KEEPING THE SABBATH.. 

Question: What is your conception of the words in the Ten Com¬ 
mandments which read, “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy? 
How should we spend the Sabbath Day ? 

BROADCASTING AND COMMUNITY WORSHIP... 

Question: Why should a person attend church when he can listen to 
the services and hear them distinctly while sitting comfortably in his 
own chair in his own room? 

WHAT HOSPITALS OWE TO CHRIST. 

Question: We are installing the radio and earphones for every patient 
in our Hospital and hope to have everything ready for your sermon and 
question box next Sunday. I have wondered .whether you would like 
to speak a kind of dedicatory word over the air at your services Sun¬ 
day so that we and our patients may hear you. 

SHOULD COAL BE NATIONALIZED?. 

Question: Don’t you think that coal mining ought to be made one 
of the national monopolies, c-oal to be exploited only by the nation 
as a whole, not for private profit? 


IS GENESIS I, HISTORY?.;. 

Question: Do you think the first chapter of Genesis is literal history? 
Why did God inspire it, if it is not true? 

DID CHRIST TEACH A GOSPEL OF HATE?. 

Question: Do you think that the Gospel of hate which Jesus taught 
in the 14th chapter of Luke and his teaching to forsake kindred had 
the tendency to unsettle the very foundations of society ? I have never 
had this subject explained in a satisfactory way. 

WHAT ACCEPTING CHRIST MEANS.. 

Question: Do you believe that all those who have failed to accept 
Christ as their divine leader will be eternally damned, even though they 
have lived lives of high moral standard? John’s Gospel, chapter 
III and verse 18 and Mark, chapter XVI and verse 16 says they will. 


PERISHING PAGANS. 

Question: If all are to be saved through Christ Jesus, how are those 
to be saved, who, both before his advent and after, in pagan countries, 
never even heard his name? 


IS STATE KILLING, MURDER?. 

Question: How far should we carry our application of the Command¬ 
ment, “Thou shalt not kill?” Does this apply to state killings? 

DID THE APOSTLES BELIEVE IN REINCARNATION?. 

Question: Does not the story of Christ and his disciples at Caesarea 
Philippi, when they said that he was John the Baptist or Elijah or one 
of the prophets, indicate that they were believers in reincarnation? 
What, in your opinion, is the value of reincarnation? 

A CURE FOR CHURCH GOSSIP.... 

Question: In the first epistle of John, the fifth chapter and the 16th 
verse, there is a strange passage about prayer and sin which I find it 
hard to understand. Will you kindly explain it? 


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CONTENTS 


SIN AND THE AFTER-LIFE.96 

Question: What does John mean in the 1st epistle of John, chapter 
III and verse 9 when he says, “Whosoever is begotten of God doeth 
no sin, because his seed abideth in him: and he cannot sin, because he 
is begotten of God.” 

WHO GOES TO HELL?.97 

Question: Would you mind discussing the seeming contradictions in 
the Bible regarding universal salvation? 

THAT GIFT OF TONGUES.98 

Question: What does I John chapter IV mean when it exhorts us 
to try the Spirits? 

AN EXPERIENCE FROM MY BOYHOOD.100 

Question: Do you think it is possible for anybody to answer ques¬ 
tions about God to somebody else’s satisfaction? Did you ever have 
any body interpret any spiritual question for you in a way that gave 
you entire satisfaction and put you at ease? I am really sincere in 
asking these questions? 

HANG THEOLOGY?.102 

Question: Since all theological attempts to explain God are human 
and therefore faulty, would it not be best to give up attempts to be 
theological and just read the story, accepting it for what it is? 

DO WE MAKE GOD IN OUR IMAGE?.103 

Question: Do you not think that the God of Moses was simply Moses’ 
conception of God and nothing more? 

BEHAVIORISM AND MIND.104 

Question: How does the Behavioristic psychology treat the problem 
of the fundamental nature of mind? 

KILL WHICH BABIES?.105 

Question: What do you think of the proposal by Clarence Darrow to 
kill off all defective babies to improve the race? 

HOW WILL CHRIST COME?.106 

Question: What will take place when Christ returns to earth again? 

Is the Church—or the Christian people—the bride of Christ to reign 
with him, and, if so, who are they to reign over? 

THE BIG THING ABOUT LINDBERGH.107 

Question: What do you regard as the big thing about Captain Lind¬ 
bergh’s flight across the Atlantic? 

CHRISTIAN AMUSEMENTS.108 

Question: Can a Christian indulge in dancing, movies, card play¬ 
ing, smoking and such things? 

IS DANCING WICKED?.109 

Question: Can a Christian, apart altogether from the rightness or 
wrongness of these things, find time for them consistently with his 
Christian profession? 

WAS IT PILATE OR CHRIST?.110 

Question: After your sermon last Sunday morning, when you claimed 
that real success was only won by service and even sacrifice, some of 
my friends said that facts were facts and that bootleggers and crooks 
were among the really successful folk of today. What can I say 
to them ? 

THIS VOLSTEAD NONSENSE?.112 

Question: In view of the growing reports of bootlegging and blind 
pigs, don’t you think we had better end this Volstead nonsense? 

















CONTENTS 


THE ANTI-SALOON LEAGUE AND SMITH.113 

Question: What is your comment on the denunciation by Stanley 
High of the Anti-Saloon League? His denunciation was chiefly con¬ 
cerned with the League’s championship and endorsement of Senator 
Smith. 

PREDESTINATION .114 

Question: Do you believe in Predestination? 

SHOULD SALACIOUS LITERATURE BE CENSORED?.116 

Question: What is your opinion of magazines of the type I mention 
in this letter? If you are opposed to them, would you mind saying 
whether they should be censored so that boys and girls of high school 
age may be saved from reading them? 

YOUTH AND THE LIPSTICK.117 

Question: Please give me your honest opinion of the use of rouge, 
lipsticks and short skirts. 

WOULD LIGHT WINES CURE US?.118 

Question: Consider the vast amount of harm that is being done 
amongst young people by the hip flask, don’t you think that the public 
sale of light wines and beers ought to be welcomed as a step in the 
right direction ? 

LUCK AND PREDESTINATION.119 

Question: What is your opinion of Predestination? To me it is the 
most obnoxious word in the Bible, but the older I grow the more I am 
forced to believe in it. 

CAN PROTESTANTISM COMBINE?.121 

Question: Don’t you think that if the Protestant churches combined 
as one denomination, they would accomplish more than now? 

THE CAUSES OF NATIONAL DECAY.122 

S uestion: I understand that you think that history repeats itself. 

o you think that the leading countries, like England, America, and 
France, are therefore heading the same way as Rome? 

CAN THE UNIVERSE DIE?.122 

Question: What is your view of the cyclical theory of energy in 
the universe and do you think that the universe is getting older and 
less energetic ? 

OUGHT WE TO BE TEMPTED?.123 

Question: Ruth Snyder wrote an article in which she said that a 
little girl had asked her how God could allow men like Gray to be 
alive in order to undermine the morals of folk like herself. Ruth 
Snyder said that she had often wondered about that herself. So have 
I. What can you say about it? 

THE STAR OF BETHLEHEM.124 

Question: Is there any astronomical justification for the idea that 
there was an actual star of Bethlehem? 

IS CHRISTMAS A PAGAN FESTIVAL?.125 

Question: Is Christmas a pagan or a Christian Festival? 

THE ENGLISH CHURCH PRAYER BOOK.126 

Question: Can you tell the public what the row in England con¬ 
cerning the new Prayer Book is about? 

AGREEING WITH A CARDINAL 1.127 

Question: What is your answer to one of the latest bans placed by 
the Roman Catholic Church on that song, Beautiful Isle of Somewhere? 

It is often requested over the radio and used at funerals. Why should 
they have banned it? 

















CONTENTS 


CAN REPENTING SINNERS REACH A SAINTS’ HEAVEN?.128 

Question: Does the sinner who has lived a vile life and who has 
broken most of the commandments succeed, by a late repentance, in 
reaching the same kind of Heaven and reap the same kind of reward 
as is reached and reaped by a good, pure character who has lived all 
his life as best he could? 

WATER AND THE SPIRIT.129 

Question: What did Christ mean when he said to Nicodemus that a 
man must be born of water and of the spirit before he can enter into 
the kingdom of God? Where is the kingdom of God? 

MY THEOLOGY.130 

Question: Just what is meant by being saved? Is there not some 
better term than this to be used by evangelists and Christian workers 
in talking with sinners? 

DON’T CHANGE THE WORD “CATHOLIC”.132 

Question: What do we mean when we use the word “Catholic” in the 
Creed? Do you think folk understand that expression? Don’t you 
think it ought to be changed? 

WAS HIS FATHER A CHRISTIAN?.133 

Question: Can one be considered a Christian who does not believe 
in what the Creed calls “everlasting life” ? 

WHEN WAS ANNO DOMINI?.134 

Question: I have read somewhere that our calculation of Anno Domini 
is wrong by several years and that Jesus was born either several 
years before or after the date he was supposed to have been born. 

Do you know anything about this, and, if so, can you make it clear 
to me? 

DID JESUS EXIST?.13G 

Question: Have you any proof outside the Bible, that Christ ever 
lived on the earth? 

DOES CHRIST’S DIVINITY MATTER?.138 

Question: Why, considering how liberal you are in other respects, 
do you insist on the Divinity of Jesus Christ? 

THE BASIS OF PRAYER.139 

Question: To what extent have we the right to expect our prayers 
to be answered? 

IS A PRAYER ANSWERED?.142 

Question: What is God’s most positive promise that prayer will be 
answered? 

PRAYER AND INCURABLE DISEASE.142 

Question: If a person is praying for the recovery of someone afflicted 
with what the doctors consider an incurable disease, what answer may 
one expect from such a prayer? 

INVOKING THE SAINTS.143 

Question: What is your judgment about the practice of praying to 
the saints on the theory that we ourselves are too sinful to approach 
Christ direct? 

“LO, HERE; LO, THERE”.144 

Question: In the Lord’s Prayer Jesus says, “Thy kingdom come.” 
Later he says, “I go to prepare a place for you.” In the latter pas¬ 
sage, it looks as if the kingdom is somewhere else. In the Lord’s 
Prayer it looks as if it will be here. Where is the Kingdom? 

SPIRITUAL TONING.145 

Question: What does the Lord’s Prayer mean when it prays to God, 
“Lead us not into temptation”? 

















CONTENTS 


PERSONAL HELP FROM PRAYER.146 

Question: Do you get personal help through prayer? If so, does it 
come from without in; or does it come from within, out? 

PRAYER AND PARALYSIS.148 

Question: I had a stroke over three years ago; have prayed with 
my husband and friends ever since but haven’t been healed yet. Is 
it right to keep on asking for this healing? 

TRESPASSES OR DEBTS?.140 

Question: Which translation do you prefer, “Forgive us our debts as 
we forgive our debtors” or, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive 
those that trespass against us?” Why? 

THE SALVATION ARMY.150 

Question: What do you think of the Salvation Army? 

DOES THE BIBLE TALK ABOUT EVERLASTING LIFE?.151 

Question: What is the difference between “everlasting life” and 
“eternal life?” 

A POINT WHERE THOUGHT GOES WRONG.152 

Question: What is the difference between inspiration and revelation? 
What 1 mean is: we speak of the Scriptures being the revealed word 
of God and we speak of them as being the inspired word of God. 

Do these expressions mean the same thing? 

A FEMALE ATHEIST.153 

Question: I am a woman. I do not believe in God. I have had 
no tragedy in my life to drive me from faith. By intellectual means 
alone, 1 have just come to the conclusion that a personal God does not 
exist. What have you to say to me? 

FAITH IS DYNAMIC.155 

Question: Do you think there is any virtue or value in believing apart 
from its object? I mean would it still be worth while to believe, 
even if there were some doubt about the object of belief—say, the 
existence of God? 

CREED OR CHRIST?.157 

Question: Do you think a man has to believe all that the Creed says 
in order to be a good Christian? 

IS THE BIBLE INFALLIBLE?.158 

Question: Would not our religious world be relieved of a dead load 
if we could, in some way, or other, get rid of the idea that the Bible 
is the infallible word of God? 

WHY GOD CREATED THE WORLD.161 

Question: What was God’s purpose in creating the world? 

IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT CHRISTIAN?.162 

Question: Does the teaching of the New Testament support capital 
punishment of whatever kind? 

WHEN DID THEY BEGIN TO WRITE THE NEW TESTAMENT?.. 163 
Question: How and by whom was Christianity carried down from 
the time of Christ until the Bible was written? 

AN UNFAITHFUL WIFE. 161 

Question: I have discovered my wife to be unfaithful to me. I have 
been a listener to you for many months and have learned to trust your 
advice. Tell me what I ought to do with her. Whatever it is, I will 
















CONTENTS 


PRE-NUPTIAL UNCHASTITY.166 

Question: There is a man who wants to marry me. He thinks me al¬ 
together chaste and good, but this has not always been so. The other 
man is dead. Do you think I ought to tell my future husband of 


my past ? 

DON’T! .166 

Question: The gentleman to whom I am engaged to be married is a 
member of a church whose name I have given you in the accompanying 
letter. He insists that I accompany him to his church when married. 

We have rather fussing discussions about this and I am a little con¬ 
cerned for the future. Will you kindly give me your advice? 

DID A WOMAN WRITE THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS?.... 167 
Question: On what do you base your thought that the Epistle to the 
Hebrews was not written by Saint Paul? I heard you state this as 
your opinion but you did not give your reasons? 

WHO ARE THE 144,000?. 169 

Question: Who are the 144,000 redeemed from amongst men? 

TEACH SEX FACTS EARLY.170 

Question: At what age should the teaching of sex be begun and how 
completely should its facts be explained to the youth of our homes? 

PROHIBITION .171 


Question: There is much discussion regarding the stand one should 
take on the Prohibition question. By the time everybody has given his 
opinion, I do not know what to think. Will you tell me what should 
be the attitude of the intelligent young American on Prohibition? 

SHOULD THE CHURCH BE RESPONSIBLE FOR COMMUNITY 

AMUSEMENTS .172 

Question: Do you think that the Church should be responsible for 
all community amusements? 

RACIAL PIGMENTATION.173 

Question: How did the various races, white, yellow, and black, get 
their color? 

CONVERSION AND CHURCH MEMBERSHIP.173 

Question: Can a man who is converted be a Christian without be¬ 
coming a church member? 

SHOULD YOUTH BE ALLOWED TO DEVELOP ITS OWN 

DESTINY? .174 

Question: A father has a son who is very bright and who seems 
to have a strongly developed musical faculty, as well as a great deal 
of ability with radio sets. He is in demand at hotels and dance halls. 

Is this the path for a Christian lad to tread? 


DOES THE CRIME OR ITS PUNISHMENT DEGRADE?.175 

Question: Do you think the electrocution of Mrs. Ruth Snyder is any 
more of a disgrace for her daughter, Loraine, than the fact that her 
mother was guilty of murdering the child’s father? 

THE MODERN YOUTH.176 

Question: In studying the present activities of us boys and girls in 
home, school, church, and community, what are the most pressing 
problems we face in learning to be Christians? 






















As Copeland Smith Sees It 

Perhaps I had better explain. Some kind of explana¬ 
tion of the impertinence expressed by any book seems 
necessary and, in the case of a book like this, doubly so. 

They tell me that at the Dill Pickle Club—most famous 
of all forums—they have a way of describing those who 
stand up to advise their fellows as victims of a “Messiah 
complex.” It is a complex suffered by reformers and hor¬ 
tatory preachers in plenty. Authors not a few are its 
victims also. 

I shall attempt a plea of Not Guilty. I have no desire 
to be mandatory towards anybody about anything. This 
book would never have been printed and the work it rep¬ 
resents would never have been inaugurated had I not 
been reared in a forum. My father was a barber and 
the barber-shop has been the debating place of all the 
nations since the beginnings of civilization. Civilization 
began when men first thought to control whiskers. Since 
all men who are men have whiskers to be removed, 
whatever their class or station, it follows that the barber¬ 
shop is the one place in the world where men meet as 
men, without distinction of class or creed. All opinions 
could be expressed for there are moments when, under 
the barber’s hand, the most vociferous are wise to be 
silent. 

Thus, from the age of ten, I worked at intervals, in 
my father’s shop, guiding the debate as best I could, by 
means of a large latherbrush and a boy’s spirit of fair- 
play. Along with the man who wielded the razor, I 
held something far more potent than a gavel in moments 
of disorder. Quite early, I began to form the opinion 


AS COPELAND SMITH SEES IT 


that no man had a monopoly in truth. Browning was just 
writing “The Ring and the Book” though I did not know 
that until afterwards. With him, I discovered that truth 
had at least nine sides—sometimes ninety, according to 
the number of customers awaiting their turn to be shaved. 
Every viewpoint had a location and truth herself emerged 
from the focal point where the views converged. 

So much for my week-day, work-a-day life. On Sun¬ 
days, we attended the Methodist Church—though not the 
American Methodist Church. In England, they still have 
in Methodism the circuit system by which the three min¬ 
isters of three churches will change from one pulpit to 
another three times in three weeks. Thus, three distinct 
and sometimes opposed expressions of the same truth were 
not impossible. Add to that, the secretaryship of a de¬ 
bating society, frequent visits to the Rationalist Asso¬ 
ciation, followed by seven years of the kind of friendly 
wrangling that is, perhaps, the most valuable part of 
college life, and you may begin to see why there is so 
much that is argumentative in this book. 

But even then, the picture will not be complete. My 
ministry may be said to have begun amongst the debaters 
of Hyde Park, London, where, for three years it was my 
duty to share with Communists, Positivists and Flat- 
earthists, that great open-air forum of the British Empire 
which surrounds the Marble Arch. That was thirty years 
ago and neither microphones nor megaphones had yet 
been invented. 

When the microphone came into my church I began to 
preach through it, not knowing that the mass of the 
people were through with preaching, for the time being. 
For many weeks I preached and for many weeks it seemed 
that my flowers of speech were born to blush unseen and 
waste their sweetness on the desert air. Then somebody 
suggested that, as Dr. Parkes Cadman was not reaching 



AS COPELAND SMITH SEES IT 


Chicago or the Mid West with his famous Question Box, 
we might have one of our own. The work of answering 
questions on religious belief, Biblical interpretation, do¬ 
mestic and moral difficulties thus began, exactly one year 
ago. The result was a blizzard of letters and inquiries. 
I have personally answered fifteen thousand letters in the 
past twelve months and the indications are that this year 
that number will be doubled. They have come from 
every part of America and from every class of society— 
since American society at last has classes, alas. 

Mostly, they have come from the non-church-going 
majority of the American people. These folk received 
what must be called their religious education, for the 
most part, in small-town churches and deemed themselves 
to have completed it before the urban exodus began. 
That meant that they received such religious education 
as they possess in the narrow confines of a church fight¬ 
ing for its existence in an over-churched community 
where every type of ecclesiasticism was fighting—often, 
by means of missionary subsidies from the ecclesiastical 
headquarters, for its very life. Strife means bitterness. 
Poverty involves cheap and ill-educated ministers. Small 
wonder that so many of the American people came to as¬ 
sociate organized religion with un-Christlike antagonisms 
with which they became too easily disgusted. They 
brought their church letters to the larger city but they 
brought with them no enthusiasm for church policies or 
church instruction. They certainly did not pursue their 
religious studies. 

Yet, because man is incurably religious, they still were 
interested in “the things that make for peace.” They 
gravitated to the Question Box, as steel filings to a mag¬ 
net. The dogmatic did not interest them. The sugges¬ 
tive enthralled them. It is largely because of their im¬ 
portunity that this book sees the light. 



AS COPELAND SMITH SEES IT 


There was another phase. Many of them were troubled 
about things other than the essentially religious. Domes¬ 
tic problems of the most delicate and obstinate kind, aris¬ 
ing from the complexities of our modern life and our ap¬ 
palling ignorance of the fundamental facts of being, 
torture vast masses of our people. Because we no longer 
know our next door neighbor and have lost the art of 
friendship amid our widening circle of acquaintance, 
life has become a very solitary affair. A lonely battle is 
a losing battle. A solitary pilgrimage is a long and 
weary pilgrimage. There is an inarticulate clamour for 
comradeship. 

That need for advice in the domestic tangle of modern 
life, that need for somebody to talk to, expressed itself 
in my multitudinous mail. I began to see folk personally, 
privately. When the Radio League of Reconciliation was 
formed, our first task was to organize what we called a 
Clinic for Disturbed Minds. Not much of its work is re¬ 
flected in the present volume because it needs a volume to 
itself. That volume is in course of preparation, though 
whether any publisher will endure to give the world such 
a disclosure of moral conditions as it must contain, is 
another matter. 

But, here and there amid these pages will be found a 
hint of what bewildering and torturing questions afflict 
the modern mind. The answers claim to be nothing more 
than suggestive. There is no truth in dogmatism. It is 
not in the hammer. It is not in the anvil. Truth is the 
spark that flashes when the hammer and the anvil meet. 
The water is not in the hydrogen, any more than it is in 
the oxygen. Neither is it in the tumult of their mixture 
in the same retort. A drop of water is formed when the 
electric spark fuses the mixture into a compound. 

In our human affairs, that spark is human sympathy— 
human understanding; that understanding which is the 



AS COPELAND SMITH SEES IT 


crowning proof of the divine in man. It need not be the 
understanding of man’s problems. It must be an under¬ 
standing of the fact that every man has a problem. There 
is much these pages only haltingly express but I hope they 
at least articulate a sympathy wider than the creeds of a 
church and broader than the confines of any ecclesiastical 
organization. 

COPELAND SMITH. 

The Radio League of Reconciliation. 

870 North LaSalle Street. 

Chicago, Illinois. 







STRAIGHT ANSWERS 

TO 

LIFE QUESTIONS 


Is the World Getting Better? 

QUESTION: How does the world view religion to¬ 
day? Would you say that the world is becoming 
more or less religious? 

ANSWER: Most certainly the world is becoming more 
and not less religious. I would say quite as positively that the 
world is becoming less dogmatic in its religion. That is to say, 
it is less and less interested in the fine shades of theological 
definition, but is much more concerned than ever before about 
the broad purpose of the teaching of Jesus. 

The World War is often used as an illustration of the re¬ 
ligious degradation of the world. I take the contrary view. 
That war was the greatest conflagration the world has ever 
seen, because it followed the greatest period of imperialistic 
expansion the world has ever seen; just as long maturing sick¬ 
ness is likely to be a severe sickness. But the contrast is 
between the strongly humanitarian work done in that war and 
the apparent lack of all consciousness of the need of such 
humanitarian work, even as late as the wars of the 18 th 
century. 

Rupert Hughes’ life of George Washington, for instance, will 
tell you that, as late as 1760 most men believed in scalping 


1 


2 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


their enemies, including white enemies; while there was no 
thought in the mind of anybody about such matters as even 
the care of wounded horses. To be severely wounded was to 
be almost certain of death. Look at the contrasts between the 
condition of labor two centuries ago, and now; between the 
number of people enfranchised then and now; between the 
position of women then and now. 

A large book entitled “Gesta Christi” by C. Loring Brace 
will give you, under their various chapter headings, the achieve¬ 
ments of Christ through the centuries in the fields of human 
activity and life. 


What Is Truth? 

QUESTION: In view of conflicting interpretations 
put upon Scripture and the differing versions of the 
meaning of life that are offered us everywhere , what 
is truth? 

ANSWER: Ah, Pilate asked that same question in the 
self-same words and somebody—I think it was Bacon—said 
he turned away before he could get an answer. But Jesus 
answered that question on another occasion and I hope you 
won’t turn away before you get your answer. Jesus said of 
himself, “I am the truth.” That is the only answer that 
I know. 

For the rest, I am as much in the dark as any Buddhist 
who ever lived. The forest of time is just as thick and be¬ 
wildering for me as for the rest, except that I try to follow 
Christ through the forest. And I believe that is the only 
thing to do in a quest for truth—to follow Christ. That 
does not just mean following him through the pages of the 
New Testament but following him through life. I think it 




TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


3 


means, as the 14 th chapter of Revelation says, “following 
the Lamb whithersoever he goeth”; into any path of service, 
along any road of sacrifice. Where we go wrong is: when we 
come to the hard places, we turn back and ever after find our¬ 
selves unhappy and alone. 

So, that is what I would answer. Truth is not a phi¬ 
losophy to be mastered. It is a life to be lived and it is lived 
by following Christ “whithersoever he goeth.” It’s a hard 
road sometimes. Sometimes there is a cross at the top of the 
hill; but I believe that the really happy people are the folk 
who literally do that—follow Christ. Perhaps the reason why 
there are so few really happy folk is that there are so few who 
do follow Christ. 


Education vs. Religion 

QUESTION: In view of the mounting crime statis¬ 
tics, dont you think that more education , instead of 
more religion , is needed to improve the world? 

ANSWER: In view of the fact that around twenty per 
cent of the people are definitely religious, and in view of the 
fact that around ninety per cent of the people are educated— 
certainly, more educated than they are religious—I should 
say not. 

I see that the “Cat” bandit, like many of our penitentiary 
inmates, is a college graduate. The chief effect of a merely 
materialistic education is to make a man who has a talent 
for mechanics a safecracker instead of a thug—and a man 
who robbed a cash register with his hands into a delicate¬ 
fingered forger. 

Our moralities control our talents. To educate the brain 
or the fingers is not going to prevent crime. It is only going 



4 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


to perfect the methods of the criminal. The task is to change 
the moral values behind the brain and fingers. That is the 
task of religion. I attribute the growth of crime, not to the 
lack of education—of which there was never so much— 
but to the neglect of the House of God. Statistics sup¬ 
port that. 

The Habit of Disliking 

QUESTION: I don't know what's the matter with 
me. I am getting into a 11 disliking" mood. I find 
myself disliking folk and disliking more of their 
peculiarities. The thing is getting dangerous because 
I dislike more and more of the things that my own 
children do and even the things that my husband 
does—if not my husband himself. What am I to do 
about it? 

ANSWER: There is an age when we are all very prone 
to drift—just drift—into that kind of mood, which may be¬ 
come a settled habit of mind. That age varies with various 
persons but is always within five years or so of our fortieth 
birthday. I said that we drift into it. The cure for drift is 
paddling, rowing. And the cure for drifting in one direction 
is to row in the other direction. 

Try to cultivate the habit of liking and finding out the 
things worth liking. It’s hard work, but so is rowing. Your 
husband—I’ll be bound there are some heroic things about 
that man—the way he receives bad news about investments 
or the way he hides the unpleasant things from you, in¬ 
stead of sharing them, as his nature calls him to do. And 
it is the same with the children; they are careless, critical, 
often cruel, but there are heroic, struggling things about 
them worth looking for. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


5 


Cultivate this liking habit with some outside interest, such 
as the Art Institute. Join it and attend the lectures. I’m 
too busy to do that but they tell me that the tendency down 
there is to teach you appreciation instead of depreciation. 
That’s fine and just what we all need about everything. The 
fact is, of course, that we are living in the most critical age 
the world has ever known and are simply pulling roses to 
pieces to find out where the smell comes from. When the 
process is ended, we wonder where the rose is. 

Get the liking habit. When you walk down “Main Street” 
keep asking yourself what you can like: the shaft of light on 
that building; the fine swing of that girl’s valiant body; 
the kindness of some bus conductor or policeman. Go to 
school to Christ who was always looking for things like that. 
That’s the medicine for your ailment. Of course, it may have 
physical basis and it might be worth while to see a doctor 
about it, telling him frankly about the disliking. 


Insurance and Assurance 

QUESTION: Do you think it right to insure our 
lives? What is the difference between insuring one's 
life and insuring one's property? 

ANSWER: I do not merely think that it is perfectly 
right to insure our lives but I think that it is the best means 
of saving and the almost imperative duty of married folk, 
both husbands and wives. 

But the rightness of life insurance is rather proved, I think, 
if we stop using the word insurance and replace it with the 
term life assurance. The distinction was explained to me 
when I was about 16 years old and I haven’t forgotten it. 
This is the way it was explained to me. We only use the word 
“insure” when we intend to provide against a possibility, 



6 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


like fire, accident, theft or something that may happen. Death 
must happen. It is not merely a possibility but a certainty. 
We cannot insure against that. But we can assure ourselves 
against some of the economic disasters or inconveniences that 
may follow death. The distinction is not always expressed 
by insurance people themselves but I think you will find it 
useful. Thank you for telling me that I am sometimes able 
to help you. That cheers me. 

Rooming-House Problems 

QUESTION: From a Christian rooming-house 
keeper . What am I to do when good , hut ignorant , 
girls from the country want to have male friends in 
their bedrooms; good girls who do not always under¬ 
stand, however , why I think that is undesirable? 

ANSWER: That is a real question and you are not the 
first conscientious rooming-house keeper who has asked it. 
It ought to throw a flood of light into many closed minds 
concerning the needs of young folk who come to the city, 
with their innocence of city dangers and of their own natures. 
One-half of a city does not know how the other half lives. 

First of all, let me say that I am certain that there are 
multitudes of rooming-house keepers who do care about their 
roomers, especially about their girl roomers, far beyond the 
mere money end of the business; who want to do the right 
thing, even if it is costly. I am sure that my questioner is 
one of them. 

The second thing that I want to say, especially to any 
girl roomers who may be listening, is that while they may be 
indignant at the very suggestion that their male friends are 
not to be trusted, it yet remains a fact that not all male 
friends—or female friends either, for the matter of that—are 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


7 


to be trusted. But, whether that is so or not, it is a fact of 
human experience not to be disputed by those who know 
themselves and the frailties of their own human nature, that 
there are moments and there are circumstances when the 
best of folk do not always care to trust themselves. 

Yet there is the real necessity for places where young folk 
can get together in couples. Why not? I know a Metho¬ 
dist church where they decided to have little booths with a 
good deal of privacy, where couples can be together with¬ 
out interruption. The mating instinct is a fine one—anyhow, 
it is a real one—and it is simple prudery not to take account 
of it. It is a shameful feature of our city civilization that 
young folk cannot get together if they want to in circum¬ 
stances that are removed both from temptation and suspicion 
against their good name. 

But I think that all rooming-house proprietors ought to 
have a sitting room—a real, large sitting room for their guests, 
instead of turning every room in the house into a bedroom. 
I believe that the loss they would suffer by not having so 
many bedrooms would be more than made up by the conven¬ 
ience of the house being something more than a mere dormi¬ 
tory. Anyhow, whatever the cost in favor or patronage, no 
wise rooming-house proprietor should allow mixed couples 
in bedrooms. 

There are ways of doing everything and I believe that if 
the matter were explained in a motherly way, not too length¬ 
ily or naggingly, right at the beginning, nice girls would re¬ 
spect the prohibition and also come to feel that there is 
somebody who cares about them to an extent that is not to 
be merely measured in terms of rent. 

The other kind of girl is scarcely worth risking the repu¬ 
tation of your home for, anyhow—I mean the girl who rebels 
against such kindly and considerate explanation at the very 
beginning of her stay. 



8 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


Methodist and Conformist 

QUESTION: Why were the Methodists called hy 
that name? What is a Non-conformist? 

ANSWER: When John Wesley and his fellow members 
of the little group at Oxford University began to gather every 
day for regular prayer and Bible study, they came under a 
great deal of ridicule. It was a dissolute and godless time. 
Because they were so regular in the time of their meeting 
and so strict in the outward discipline of their lives, they were 
nicknamed Methodists and the nickname stuck, right to this 
day until it has become part of our Methodist glory. 

The word Nonconformist does not rightly have any mean¬ 
ing in America. It came into use when Charles II came to 
the throne of England after the Cromwellian regime had run 
its course. Charles’ chief minister of state was the Earl of 
Clarendon. He instituted an Act of Parliament in 1662 re¬ 
quiring everybody to subscribe to everything in the Book of 
Common Prayer. This, the Cromwellian party, consisting of 
Quakers, Presbyterians, Baptists and what in England are 
called today the members of the Free Churches, refused to 
do. They did not conform, so received the name Noncon¬ 
formists. Sir Harry Vane was one of their leaders. It was 
due to their sufferings that the original band of Pilgrim fath¬ 
ers and mothers were so strongly recruited in America, in 
the following fifty years—to the extent of 70 , 000 , I believe. 


What Are Thoughts? 

QUESTION: Are our thoughts simply bodily ac¬ 
tivities or do some of them have their source in our 
spiritual natures? 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


9 


ANSWER: That has been the question agitating the 
minds of philosophers since the Greek Age. My own view, 
of course, is that in addition to the mind and the body, 
there is a third part of man called the soul. This is a kind 
of antenna, picking up the stream of ideas that are always 
flowing from the great central source of all thought—God. 
The mind translates these ideas into thought and the body 
translates the thoughts into actions. 

The souls are the antennae, the minds are the receiving 
sets, translating the air waves into sound waves; and the 
body is the loud speaker, giving the thoughts form and ex¬ 
pression in action. That is my own view. I think it is the 
general Christian view. How else do we account for the 
phenomenon of a general, a mass movement of thought and 
progress? 

Christianity lived comfortably with slavery for eighteen 
centuries. Then, almost suddenly, like a breeze from the 
celestial hills, came a very general consciousness that this 
thing and the Christian religion were incompatible with each 
other. In England, first, then in America, that impression 
became more or less general, finally spreading through the 
whole Christian world until today, every so-called Christian 
nation finds it necessary to include the repression of slavery 
amongst its policies. 

Where did that impression come from, except from the 
Throne of God, first of all; then into the souls of men; then, 
into their minds and then, through their speech, their swords 
and guns, translating itself into living and saving action? 

The Meaning of Going to the Altar 

QUESTION: Do you believe that a man can obtain 
the spirit of God by just coming forward and giving 
his hand to the preacher at the altar? 



IO 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


ANSWER: Yes, I do—and, no, I don’t. It all de¬ 
pends on the inner emotion and determination of the man 
who comes forward. It’s like a wedding ceremony. If the 
man getting married is saying in his heart all the while, 
“All I’m getting married for is to get this woman’s money— 
or to get a comfortable home for myself regardless of her”— 
or for some other purely selfish reason like that; then, noth¬ 
ing that may be said or done in the marriage ceremony can 
be worth anything, however sincere the preacher may be. 
It depends on the disposition of the couple coming to the 
altar. 

It’s the same with the Sacrament. There is no virtue in 
the outward act. It’s the heart desire of the man or woman 
coming to the Sacrament that determines its value. 

So with the man coming to the altar making his decision 
for Christ. If he means that—just that—there is a virtue 
in the outward act. It defines and marks the inward de¬ 
cision, gives him a date to look back to, gives him an anchor 
in coming moments of fluctuation to hang on to. But, as a 
piece of ritual, just meaning nothing of these things, the 
act, like all other symbolic acts, is valueless—indeed, being 
hypocritical, it is harmful. 


Soul, Spirit and Mind 

QUESTION: What is the difference between “soul” 
and “spirit;” between “mind” and “spirit”? 

ANSWER: The Greek word used for spirit is “pneuma” 
which is the word from which we get the word pneumatic 
and the word pneumonia. Strictly, it means “breath.” 

The Greek word for “soul” is the word “psyche,” the word 
from which we make the word “psychology.” Strictly, the 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


ii 


word for spirit is used of spirit, in a general way. The word 
for soul is used to describe that part of the universal spirit 
which is, so to speak, separated off into a distinct human 
soul. Just as the Greek word “sarks” is the word for all 
flesh, while the word “soma” is used for that part of all 
flesh which happens to be our own or somebody else’s body. 

The Greek word for mind is “sophos” and means exactly 
what “mind” means in English; the actively thinking, reason¬ 
ing element in man. 


How to Read the New Testament 

QUESTION: What advice about the intelligent read¬ 
ing of the New Testament would you give to a business 
woman who has little time to spare but does earnestly 
wish to read her Testament with enjoyment and 
profit? 

ANSWER: That is a very fine question and rejoices me. 
I fancy it expresses a widespread desire. That is why I have 
picked it out from the mass this week for more lengthy an¬ 
swer. The most gratifying feature of this Question Box is 
the new interest it is creating in the New Testament. In 
almost every letter we get testimony of that. 

First, let me say this. It will sound silly but it is not silly. 
Don’t trouble to buy a New Testament until you can afford 
one with a good type. There are a mighty lot of folk who 
are sick of the New Testament because their eyes got sick of 
it first, without their brains knowing it. There is not another 
book in the world that could have retained its interest under 
the sort of treatment that Bibles have received from publish¬ 
ers. Think what would happen if either school books or 



12 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


novels were printed that way. Wait till you can afford a 
good type. Don’t be put off with what you don’t want. 

Second, don’t buy anything that has not marginal readings. 
I don’t mean marginal references but corrections of the text 
in the margin. I wish I could spend one hour on that alone. 
Here is one sample reason, however. When the committee 
of revisers for the New Testament was formed, it was com¬ 
posed of about one-half real Greek scholars and authorities on 
old manuscripts and about one-half just church dignitaries. 

In 1881 , the oldest New Testament manuscript was found 
that made many interesting, and some important, changes in 
the less old copies of the Gospels. But before a change could be 
made in the version of 1611 —called the King James version 
—there had to be a two-thirds vote of the committee. The 
dignitaries were against change and were in continual oppo¬ 
sition to the scholars, with the result that the most correct 
readings, failing of a two-thirds majority, are most often to 
be found in the margin and not in the text. 

If I were you, I would get Moffatt’s translation. It is 
written in modern English and takes account of all the cor¬ 
rections that the discovery of ancient copies of the Gospels 
have necessitated. Weymouth is almost equally good; but 
these two are the best for common use. 

Then, do this: Confine yourself to St. Mark’s Gospel, 
until you have read it and re-read it. It was the first Gospel 
written for busy people. Matthew and Luke both copy large 
portions of it into their Gospels. It is very vivid and attrac¬ 
tive in its style. It is short. Stick to Mark. 

Then, if you are not too poor, buy Dr. David Smith’s book, 
“The Days of His Flesh.” It will cost you four dollars, but 
it is worth it to anybody who really cares for the under¬ 
standing of the Bible. Charge it to benevolences, if you 
like, because benevolences will get the money back some day. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


i3 


Does Crime Pay? 

QUESTION: The street cars have very attractive 
advertisements showing a very handsome policeman 
arresting a very poor-looking criminal and entitled , 
“You Can’t Win.” If this were true , the advertise¬ 
ment would be unnecessary. Government figures 
show that only 20% of the crimes are discovered. 
How can it be true that “ You can’t win”? 

ANSWER: Well, it depends on the viewpoint. It ought 
to be admitted that, in view of the large number of crook 
attorneys—the delays in administering justice which are mak¬ 
ing America the reproach of the whole world—and the feeling 
that the police are too closely allied with the criminal classes, 
the bringing of criminals to book is not as successful as it 
should be in a civilized community. 

But even so, “you can’t win.” You are out of decent 
society, for one thing. Then, somebody said the other day, 
that, apart from bootleggers (who are a class by themselves) 
there was not an ordinary criminal in Chicago worth $2,000. 
Then, there must be a certain amount of discomfort in know¬ 
ing that everybody is looking for you, as the enemy of con¬ 
stituted Society. And, yet again, there is still a thing called 
Conscience and there is still a Being named God. 


The Trinity 

QUESTION: You remember Jesus said, “The 
Father judgeth no man but hath committed all judg¬ 
ment unto the Son.” Now , if Jesus is to judge man¬ 
kind . . . and if he is the creator of all things and 
powers as St. Paul claimed , is he not the only God? 



14 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


ANSWER: I don’t think we need worry our heads a 
little bit about the doctrine of the Trinity. Like you, Jesus 
is God enough for me and I am quite sure that there is no 
jealousy in the Trinity. So that, even if we did make a mis¬ 
take in praying over much to one person in the Trinity to the 
exclusion of the other persons, there would be no harm done. 

I think that Christ is the understandable part of the Deity, 
revealed to us men for that very purpose and we do well to 
do all we can to understand him. If you feel best able to 
address yourself to the Son, to the entire exclusion of the 
Father, I fancy the Father will be honored, rather than 
otherwise. 


Is Gandhi a Christian? 

QUESTION: How do you account for the fact that 
through the influence of Gandhi , the Hindu , and by 
his methods , he has been the medium through which 
a great deal of interest in Christ has come and that , 
through Gandhi , India's program has become one of 
soul-force instead of armed rebellion? Does this not 
indicate that there is a danger of putting merely 
moral folk on a plane with Christianity of the full 
and definite kind? 

ANSWER: So long as we definite Christians—as you 
call us in your letter—give such a rotten example of what defi¬ 
nite Christianity is, it is always very possible for merely moral 
people to come very near to our level of living. I think that 
many of these people pass that level, to our discredit. But that, 
of course, is a reflection against us, not against our faith. 

But the fact that Gandhi, modest to a fault, declines to 
call himself a Christian, is not proof that he is not a Chris- 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


i5 


tian. “By their fruits, ye shall know them,” and I should 
argue that Christ himself may well think the Hindu leader, 
so sublimely gentle and winsome, is one of the most sincere 
and influential of his followers on the earth at this time. 

Personally, I do not think that church membership—or 
even the swallowing whole of all our dogma about Christ, 
is the only test, or the supreme test. The supreme test is 
in that question of Christ’s—“What do ye more than others?” 


What Is Paradise? 

QUESTION: You said , last week , that the word 
Paradise had a long and interesting history , which 
you had no time to tell then. Have you time now? 
How much do you know , anyhow? Give us the 
history. 

ANSWER: I know about one thousandth part of what 
I ought to know in order to conduct this Question Box to 
the satisfaction of myself and one ten-thousandth part of 
what I ought to know in order to conduct it to the satisfac¬ 
tion of everybody else. 

But I do happen to know the history of the word Para¬ 
dise. It comes from Babylonia, where the Hebrews were 
exiled. It was used to describe the hanging gardens and 
other resting places of the Babylonian kings, who, if all that 
is said about them is true, needed some resting places. But 
you can see that the word conveyed the idea of a more or 
less temporary rest, not a permanent one, or a fixed condition. 

It was brought back from their exile by the Hebrews, and 
incorporated into their language to describe the place of the 
interim resting place of the soul, the Abraham’s bosom, where 
good Jews awaited the final judgment. It was in that sense 



i6 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


that Jesus used it when he said to the thief on the cross, 
“Today, thou shalt be with me in Paradise.” 


Can We Prove Faith? 

QUESTION: If we have no way of verifying our 
faith until after death , why should we try to influence 
other people's religion , lest in doing so we possibly 
become responsible for their error? 

ANSWER: Well, that’s a big “If,” isn’t it? All the 
really religious people I have met, refuse to acknowledge that 
“If.” I don’t know whether or not you are married. If you 
are married, how do you prove that your wife loves you? 
If not married, how do you prove that your mother loves 
you? Not by any process that can be reduced to terms of 
logic, yet anybody who is greatly loved would say that the 
proof is stronger than logic, better than any logic can offer, 
being immediate and convincing in itself. 

That is what the really religious people say. I don’t mean 
the professedly religious people, but the undoubted saints. 
They may be few but they are dead certain, with a deep 
conviction. There is no “IF”; not with them. 

Now, take another argument which I don’t like using, 
however, because of careless hearers. Suppose the Christian 
form of faith is wrong, what is that dreadful risk that we run 
by teaching it to folk? Is it destructive of civilization, or 
an upbuilder of civilization? Is it more moral or less moral 
than anti-Christian forms of life? Does it induce parents to 
make home a kinder place for children or a less kindly place? 
Does it destroy chastity or enhance it? 

Suppose we are wrong about immortality and that there is 
no immortality. Then, we shall all be everlastingly dead 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


17 


anyway. Who has lost anything then, by any false belief 
in their lifetime about immortality? 

During your lifetime, you gain immensely by faith, anyway, 
quite apart from the truth of the thing you believe. Faith 
is fire, says Browning in “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”; while 
disbelief is ice. It makes a chill in the air and anemia in 
the blood. It destroys social enthusiasm. What’s the use of 
anything if Christ doesn’t live; if there is to be no final vin¬ 
dication for righteousness? 

But, of course, that has nothing to do with my own con¬ 
viction of the fact that Christ does live, and act, and love 
our lives. That conviction is absolute and unshakable. 


The Kingdom Both In and 
Amongst Us 

QUESTION: To whom did Jesus speak in Luke 17 
the 21 st verse? Did he say that the Kingdom of God 
was within them or among them? 

ANSWER: Jesus was distinctly speaking to the Phari¬ 
sees. The whole passage reads: “And being asked by the 
Pharisees, when the Kingdom of God cometh, he answered 
them and said, The Kingdom of God cometh not with ob¬ 
servation; neither shall they say, Lo, here! or Lo, there! 
for, lo, the Kingdom of God is within you.” 

Now, he may have meant that it was within the Phari¬ 
sees. I suppose that is your difficulty. But look at it. It is 
possible that there are all kinds of hidden potentialities within 
everybody if they would develop them. He may have meant 
that it was like that with the indwelling Kingdom of God. 

But I don’t think he meant that. You are quite right in 
your letter when you say that the English translation is some- 



i8 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


times confusing. Moffatt says that it means that the “reign 
of God is in your midst”—in the midst of you. That is bet¬ 
ter because the Greek preposition for “in” also means 
“amongst.” He himself was amongst them and where the 
King is, there is the Kingdom, of course. 


Is the Book of Job Biography? 

QUESTION: Do you regard the Book of Job as 
biography or as pure drama? 

ANSWER: I like to think that the Book of Job is both 
biography and drama. Of course, it must be drama, being 
so deeply concerned with the counsels that took place in 
Heaven between God and Satan. But my own private thought 
about it is that the first chapter is either the story of a real 
man and his sufferings or else the story of the sufferings of 
several men gathered, so to speak, into one life. 

There is no doubt about the real biographical character of 
that first chapter, in the sense that there is nothing humanly 
impossible about the things that so tragically happened to 
Job. They have all happened to somebody, even if no one 
man has suffered them all. Even that is possible of belief 
to anybody who saw the piling up of tragedy that took place 
in some English and French homes during the War. 

But the rest is drama and drama of the most wonderful and 
vivid kind. Nowhere else in literature is the problem of evil 
so powerfully argued. Of course, the problem is not com¬ 
pletely answered in Job, any more than it is in any other 
literature of any nation. That is because the problem is not 
intended by God to be completely answered. That is where 
the need for faith comes in. Without suffering, there would 
be little incentive to belief. 




TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


i9 


Sin—Notorious and Covered 

QUESTION: What does I Timothy , chapter 5 , verse 
24 mean when it says that some men's sins go before 
unto judgment? 

ANSWER: Here is Dr. Moffatt’s translation of the 
verse you mention: “Some men’s sins are notorious and call for 
judgment, but in some cases, sin only comes out afterwards.” 
I hope that makes it plain. We English readers suffer much 
through the changes in the English language since the times 
when King James’ Version was given to the world in 16n. 
That is why we owe such a great debt to men like Moffatt, 
Weymouth and Goodspeed for their sincere and scholarly 
attempts to bring the New Testament, especially, back from 
the studies of the scholars to the life and speech of the com¬ 
mon man, where it really belongs. 

It needs to be emphasized again and again that the New 
Testament was not written by scholars for scholars but by 
working men for working men. Nobody is making us see 
that as clearly as Dr. Adolf Deissmann, and in his recent 
book “Paul” he describes what kind of a man Paul was, 
what calloused hands his were, and why and how he pre¬ 
pared his letters to the slaves and humble folk, making what 
he called “large letters” because the hand that had been 
working at the loom all day could not make smaller ones. 
But all that is by the way. 

Importunity In Prayer 

QUESTION: In Luke's Gospel , chapter 18 , Christ 
likens God to an unjust judge. What does this mean? 

ANSWER: It means several things. The first of them 
is that the government of the Universe is personal, if Jesus 



20 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


knows anything about it. Being the only-begotten Son of 
the Father, he may be supposed to know—the pseudo-scientists 
notwithstanding. That being the case, the government of the 
Universe may be affected by the prayer of those who are suf¬ 
ficiently interested in the government of the Universe to in¬ 
terpose their prayers. 

Christ does not liken God to an unjust judge, however, ex¬ 
cept for purposes of illustration. Everywhere and all the 
time, Christ insists that God is our Father. That being so, 
he constantly urges us to make our requests known to Him 
—and not known merely but insistently and importunately 
known. In two very lengthy passages in Luke’s Gospel, he 
impresses the value of importunity upon his disciples. In 
the eleventh chapter, he tells the story of the man who came 
to his friend for some loaves at midnight. The friend was in 
bed and the night was cold. He did not want to become 
chilled. But the importunate friend kept on knocking. There 
were children in the house and so, rather than make matters 
worse by waking the baby, he gave to his friend as many as he 
wanted of the loaves he had. 

Now, in the eighteenth chapter, Christ changes the illustra- 
tation but insists on the same fact of the value of insistent 
prayer. He tells a story of a widow who lived in a town where 
the judge was unjust. The original is very dramatic. It says 
that she clutched the robe of the judge and kept on nagging 
at him. So that, at last—just because she was a nuisance— 
he gave her the judgment. 

All this is, of course, very unmodern and very unscientific. 
But we have to make up our minds whether the “only begotten 
Son who is in the bosom of the Father,” has revealed Him or 
whether we must leave the matter of deciding whether prayer 
is possible to the scientific people. Christ insisted that the gov¬ 
ernment of the Universe was the government of a family. If 
that is so, then prayer—importunate prayer—has its place. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


21 


Jesus and His Mother 

QUESTION: Why did Jesus treat his mother with 
so much indifference in public life? 

ANSWER: Four times, as you say, he is referred to in 
the Gospels as being with his mother—at the time of the 
Temple visit, he was surprised at her anxiety at losing him. 
That may indicate something. That he did not neglect her is 
indicated by the fact that he is not only called “The Carpen¬ 
ter’s Son” but “The Carpenter,” indicating that after the 
death of Joseph, he became the support of the family, in¬ 
heriting the care of the family that Joseph had left behind. 

I am not so sure as you are that she understood her first¬ 
born son. She was one of those who thought he had gone mad. 
See Mark III, 21 and 31. 

In spite of the apparent aloofness which he showed at Cana, 
you should notice that his mother did not seem to be rebuffed. 
She says, “Whatever he says unto thee, do it.” 

Twice he is translated as merely addressing her as “Woman.” 
If this is the cause of your feeling about him, it may be re¬ 
moved immediately to the extent that the word he used was 
“gunai,” best translated as Madam or Lady. 

The fact that he gave her into the care of John at the 
Crucifixion is some indication that his brothers were either un¬ 
able to or undesirous of supporting her. She may have prev¬ 
iously sided with them against him as Mark III seems to in¬ 
dicate. We do not read of them having any interest in his 
doings until after the Resurrection, in the interval just before 
Pentecost. See Acts I, 14. 

Don’t you think it is very hard for us to transport ourselves 
into the atmosphere of the first century and its different re¬ 
lations between the sexes, even between mothers and sons? 
And don’t you think that we are all a little affected by 
Mariolatry, even the most Protestant amongst us? It may 



22 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


have been that the mother of Jesus was a very simple peasant 
and a very misunderstanding one, even until the Resurrection 
or near it. 


What Does Selah Mean? 

QUESTION: Would you mind telling me what the 
word “Selah” at the end of some of the verses of the 
Psalms means? Has it any modern significance? 

ANSWER: I believe that Hebrew scholars are still at 
outs with themselves concerning the meaning of Selah. Where 
that is the case, we ordinary folk may well leave the matter 
as one that does not involve salvation. The fundamentally 
important things in the Scriptures are plain and commonly 
understood. It is only the things that are relatively unim¬ 
portant that are obscure. 

I think, however, that “Selah” is generally understood to 
have been a musical sign for the guidance of the cantor, like 
the “crescendo” sign in modern music, for instance. Some 
scholars think it was a sign that the instrumental accompani¬ 
ment should take up the strain. Others think that it meant 
that the congregation should repeat. Anyhow, it has no sig¬ 
nificance for the ordinary reader. 


Is Freemasonry Christian? 

QUESTION: Is the Masonic Lodge a Christian 
organization? There are hosts of men belonging to 
this lodge who never enter a church nor do they pro - 
fess Christianity. 

ANSWER: That is a very good question. As I happen 
to be a Mason, having been chaplain of a lodge for many 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


23 


years, let me say that I am quite satisfied that the Free and 
Accepted Order of Master Masons is an organization founded 
on Christian principles. It is the largest philanthropic order 
in the world. It is one of the few orders which overleap our 
narrowly nationalistic boundaries, and embraces men of every 
color, every nation, every language. The Bible is its guide. 
In the lower branches, the Old Testament predominates in 
influence. But in the higher orders, the New Testament 
comes into fuller significance. 

There is nothing un-Christian in secret societies. The early 
Christians belonged to secret burial guilds and the catacombs 
are the result of those secret burials. As you know, they are 
largely filled with early Christian graves, proving the close con¬ 
nection between early Christianity and the Roman secret so¬ 
cieties. The Masons, however, do not regard themselves so 
much as a secret society as a society with secrets. The big 
secret of them all is the secret of their fine brotherliness. 

Of course, there are hosts of Masons who never enter church. 
That is a serious reflection on themselves, not on Masonry, 
though my personal opinion is that official Masonry, in the 
local lodges, does not sufficiently insist on this aspect of the 
question. 

About a Mason professing Christianity—he is not required 
to in the lower branches. What he is required to do, however, 
is to profess to a belief in God. But in the higher branches, 
he is supposed to be a professing Christian also, and is a hypo¬ 
crite if he is not. But the number of hypocrites in any organ¬ 
ization should not let us lose the fact of the essential value 
of the organization itself. 


Are Illegitimate Babies Damned? 

QUESTION: Would you teach that the fact that a 
man and woman are unmarried makes their off - 



24 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


spring a baby damned from its birth—as so many 
try to teach? 

ANSWER: Mind you, my answer is going to shock some 
people. There was never a baby born yet who was damned 
in a spiritual sense because it was not conceived or born in 
wedlock. To state the contrary, offends the very spirit of 
Jesus, because it is casting a stone in the path of one of his 
little ones. 

Moreover, I doubt very much whether illicit conception 
really damages the baby physically. Babies are born much 
more healthy and free from taint than we are willing to admit. 
It is being questioned whether even syphilis is inborn. It 
is an outside infection that may begin to infect the baby at 
the moment of birth, but it is not inborn in the baby. 

That, however, is another question. What I repeat is that 
it is blasphemy against the very spirit and teaching of Jesus 
that children are ever born to be damned because of something 
their parents did. It doesn’t matter whether it is a church or 
an individual who teaches the contrary; that teaching is one 
of the fundamental lies that God will not easily forgive. 

That does not excuse illicit relationships. But even there, 
Society is sometimes much more to blame than the individual 
young fools who do the silly thing. When Society is responsible 
for a rotten state of economics that makes the marriage of 
young lovers impossible, then Society must carry some of the 
load of responsibility. 


An Obstinate Husband and Father 

QUESTION: I don't want to risk , in any way , the 
fine confidence which this troubled lady has placed 
in me. So I have not stated her question. You must 
read between the lines. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


25 


This lady’s daughter has fallen into sin. Her 
father regards it as a sin so grievous that he wants her sent 
away from home. The mother thinks—and I agree with her— 
that any harshness now might drive her daughter deeper into 
shame. That poor girl must be kept in an atmosphere of 
parental love in order to save her from worse things than 
have yet befallen her. 

The difficulty is the obstinate husband. It generally is. 
He is wrong and in grave danger of offending the Holy Spirit 
by his attitude of unholy righteousness. Sins of the flesh are 
undoubtedly sinful but they are no more sinful than sins of 
the spirit. A hard and glassy self-righteousness is, perhaps, 
the worst sin of all and has driven more folk into the hell of 
a deep despair than all the sins of the flesh put together. 

I think that your daughter ought to marry the boy if, after 
this experience, she is quite sure she loves him. That is the 
only reason for marriage, anyway. There must be no marry¬ 
ing just to save her face or to help the reputation of her 
father. Love is the only justification for marriage, hard as it 
is to say that just now. 

Love of home is going to save your daughter now and love 
of her baby, afterwards. Destroy either of them and you 
destroy her. Not even your love for your husband must allow 
you to do that. 

I don’t know what further advice to give you. It’s very 
hard to advise a wife to defy her husband. I don’t know that, 
in his present mood, home would be very homelike for your 
daughter. His pride is the chief trouble. Perhaps he is feel¬ 
ing that he will suffer in the eyes of his fellow citizens. If so, 
why not get a few of the best men and women you know 
to talk to him and convince him that he would win the 
reproach of decent people if he did not deal lovingly with 
his daughter. 



26 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


That doesn’t mean that either you or he are going to be 
what I am afraid I must call “sloppy” with her. I don’t 
mean that. There must be no palliation of her fault. But 
it is not an irreparable fault and the temptations that girls 
are suffering nowadays in some environments are terrible. 
Love and prayer will show you the way. God bless you. If 
you ask me, I’ll write your husband but I think you can 
handle him best. 


Can Divorced Folk Be Saved? 

QUESTION: I have been in bed for eleven weeks 
with tuberculosis . I am so thankful for the radio 
and wish every home could know about your Ques¬ 
tion Box . I am worried by this question : Can a per¬ 
son who has been divorced and remarried ever be 
saved? I was divorced from a man not fit to live with . 

ANSWER: I take you at your word. You say your first 
husband was not fit to live with. Christ does not require us to 
live with folk not fit to live with. That is to say, not with 
folk that are unfit to live with most of the time. But even if 
he had been fit to live with, there is no way that I know of 
undoing what has been done. 

Don’t stop to ask yourself whether you can be saved. You 
are saved; listen to me —are saved, not will be. So is every¬ 
body who lives under the wings of God, if I may put it like 
that. You don’t have to do anything but just live in the 
certainty that because of the infinite love of God, especially for 
folk who are sick with tuberculosis or in any kind of fear or 
sorrow, you have an infinite shelter from all things that would 
hurt or destroy you. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


27 


Being a Good Soldier of Jesus Christ 

QUESTION: What do you understand Paul to 
mean in Second Epistle to Timothy, second chapter, 
and twelfth verse, when he says, u If we endure, we 
shall also reign with him. If we deny him, he will 
also deny us.” 

ANSWER: I think he means exactly what he says. The 
change that I made from your word “suffer” to my word 
“endure” is the change which the Revised and, I believe, the 
Standard Version makes. You should read the whole chapter. 
The days of persecution are beginning. Paul is in a Roman 
prison, perhaps on the eve of execution. The persecuting 
tendency is spreading like a thunder cloud. Timothy will soon 
be left alone to keep the churches constant even in dire dis¬ 
aster. His is a terribly responsible post and a seriously fright¬ 
ening trust. Demas has already run away. The need is for 
the kind of man that that Roman soldier at Herculaneum was 
—who refused to retire without orders, even though the moun¬ 
tain was belching fire. 

Christ did it, enduring the cross, despising the shame. The 
servant is not above his master, or the disciple above his Lord. 
If we run away from him who did not run away, he will not 
recognize us as his soldiers. If, however, we stand fast, like 
good soldiers, we shall enter into his rest and rewards. 


Transubstantiation 

QUESTION: Do the verses in St. John's Gospel, 
chapter six and verses 52 - 58 , give any warrant for 
believing in the Transubstantiation of the elements 
in the Holy Communion? 




28 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


ANSWER: The dogma of Transubstantiation is the 
teaching that by the word of the priest, the bread and wine 
used in the Holy Communion are changed in their substance 
from bread and wine to flesh and blood of Christ. You say 
that some Lutheran Synods hold to the dogma of Transub¬ 
stantiation. I think not, but the dogma of Consubstantiation 
is so very like it, that I do not wonder at laymen mak¬ 
ing the mistake of supposing that Lutherans believe in 
Transubstantiation. 

Now the question arises in your letter whether Jesus in 
the chapter you named—the sixth chapter of St. John— 
taught that. It is largely a matter of opinion and, I think, 
entirely depends upon whether your mind was built after the 
very literalistic pattern of the German mind, or after the 
more mystical pattern of the French or the British. If the 
latter, you will say that when Jesus said, “Except ye eat the 
flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, ye have not 
life in yourselves,” he was speaking allegorically, mystically, 
figuratively. If the former, then you will say that he liter¬ 
ally meant every syllable he said. 

But I should point out, I think, that he always did speak 
in parables; that Orientals, such as Jesus was, always do; 
that his hearers were quite accustomed to this form of speech; 
that they understood him to be speaking figuratively, because 
his body was still unbroken before them. 

To myself, the idea that we feed on Jesus Christ in our 
stomachs always seems the depth of rather brutish literalness 
and I am quite free to say that I do not understand it. In 
the Communion Service, we say, “Feed on Christ in thy 
Heart”—thy heart—which expresses for me the mystical 
fact that all our life is derived from Christ, that we do live 
on him, very dependently, day by day and that our par¬ 
taking of the Holy Communion is our testimony to that fact 
of an inward life derived from him. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


29 


What Is the Lord’s Supper? 

QUESTION: What is the difference between the 
teaching of the Lutheran churches and that of the 
Roman church regarding the Eucharist? Would you , 
at the same time , mind stating your own view? 

ANSWER: I am not a specialist concerning the various 
theories of the various churches regarding the real presence 
of Christ at the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Briefly, 
as I understand it, the difference between the Roman and 
the Lutheran view of the Real Presence at the Sacrament is 
the difference between two words much used at the time 
of the controversy in the days of the Reformation. 

The Roman view is expressed by the word, “Transubstan- 
tiation”; the idea being that the elements, the bread and the 
wine, are converted in their substance into the actual body 
and blood of Christ. The Lutheran view, as I understand 
it, is expressed by the word “Consubstantiation” which con¬ 
veys that together with the bread and wine, the body of 
Christ and his blood are there. There is no change in the 
elements but along with them goes the body and blood of 
Christ whether the partaker is a believer or not. If he is a 
believer, then he partakes of these to his profit; if he is not 
a believer, then he partakes of them to his destruction. 

Neither position expresses my view, which is expressed very 
largely by the Rubric of the Episcopal Church, contained in 
its Prayer Book, which says “The body of Christ is given, 
taken and eaten, only after a heavenly and spiritual manner. 
And the means whereby the body of Christ is received and 
eaten in the Supper is by Faith.” That is to say, I believe 
that the Christian life is, so to speak, one long Eucharist in 
that, just as the branch derives its life from the central stem 
and root of the vine, so does the believer receive all that is 



30 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


really life through Christ. The Sacrament is to me the par¬ 
able and symbol of that daily and hourly partaking, its out¬ 
ward and visible expression. 


Is the Pope Christ’s Vicar? 

QUESTION: Do you believe that the Pope of Rome 
is the representative of Jesus Christ on earth? 

ANSWER: I have announced before that I must re¬ 
fuse to answer questions that create controversy between 
Protestant and Catholic and between Jew and Gentile. There 
are too many things uniting us to emphasize the things that 
divide us. 

But I will say this about the Pope of Rome; just to the 
degree that he is a Christian man, so is the Pope Christ’s 
representative here. I think the Pope is a very good man, 
so I think he is Christ’s real representative. And just in the 
same degree is that true of you or me. We are Christ’s rep¬ 
resentatives just as we reflect Christ in our lives. 


Birth Control 

QUESTION: What is your view concerning birth 
control? 

ANSWER: My view on birth control is like my view 
on divorce. It entirely depends on the individual circum¬ 
stances. I know cases where both would be a crime. I 
know cases where neither would be a crime. And my clinical 
work gives me a list of many cases of both kinds. I refuse 
to dogmatize in this matter as in most others. 

In the circumstances quoted in the letter from which this 
question comes, I should not have the slightest hesitation 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


3i 


in endorsing it. Five children in six years. Three dead. A 
husband who is tubercular and a wife who is a semi-invalid 
already. If those are the facts, as represented, there is not 
a good woman or a good man with any common sense who 
would not endorse birth control. 

But there are other cases, and because this is a question 
that is much discussed nowadays, I propose, with some plain¬ 
ness of speech to discuss the question from some other angles 
than that presented in the letter I refer to. So far as the 
sinfulness of birth control is concerned, the greatest social 
sin—the only social sin, for the matter of that—is selfishness. 
And, in many cases, birth control is a very malignant form of 
selfishness and nothing more. 

I’ve just been reading Edwin Balmer’s splendid novel, 
“The Breath of Scandal” and I entirely agree with the author 
that a woman who marries, deliberately intending not to have 
children, even though there are no economic or physical 
reasons why she should not, is cheating herself and the Uni¬ 
verse for purely selfish ends. To substitute Boston puppies 
for children is a sin against the human race. Whether a 
woman has children or not, she owes it to Society to exercise 
her maternal instincts for the human race for some beneficent 
and ministering end—in a direct form and not merely in¬ 
directly, by means of a check-book. 

I have been reading some interesting statistics which ought 
to alarm all lovers of humanity. They apply to England 
chiefly, but I fancy they would be much more true of Amer¬ 
ica, in spite of the fact that all information concerning con¬ 
traception is illegal here, though legal in England since the 
famous trial of Dr. Marie Stopes about six years ago. I’m 
going to take a little time with this because my mail illus¬ 
trates to me that it is a matter of burning public interest 
and of wide social import. 



32 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


Here is what the British Weekly of October 20, 1927, says 
about present-day conditions in England: 

“No modern movement has had a greater effect on marriage 
and morals than Birth Control—the discussion of which is 
everywhere free and unfettered. It used to be said that when 
God sent a mouth, he sent the food to fill it. Nobody be¬ 
lieves that now and nobody is prepared to act upon it. The 
limitation of the family is a generally accepted fact and we 
already see the result in the rapidly falling birth rate. If 
the birth rate of fifty years ago prevailed in Europe today, 
there would be two and one-half millions more babies born in 
the year. The British birth rate is now the lowest in Europe 
with the exception of Sweden. 

In 1920—before the S topes’ trial—957,000 babies were born. 
In 1926, with a larger number of parents of suitable age, 
only 694,000 babies were born. The drop in six years was 
263,000 births, or over 27 per cent. The birth rate of the 
better educated classes in France is 30 per cent above that 
of the corresponding groups of England. Birth Control now 
amounts to an obsession with many women. In 1926 and 
1927, the women of the Liberal and Labor parties passed res¬ 
olutions on the subject in face of the opposition of the party 
leaders. The tragic side of the movement is that the wide¬ 
spread knowledge of contraception has led to much immoral¬ 
ity amongst unmarried men and women.” 

Those are the effects so far as England is concerned. I 
fancy it is only fair to say that the declining birth rate may 
be due to other causes, also; amongst them a severe condi¬ 
tion of unemployment from which England is only just re¬ 
covering. It is also true, of course, that England can survive 
for a very long time with a lower birth rate than she had 
previously. Her emigration statistics prove that, though, on 
the other hand, Dr. Allinson showed when I was a boy that 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


33 


her land could support many more persons by intensive culture 
of the soil than at present. 

But it may not be a good thing for civilization in general 
and for America, in particular, when the Northern European 
countries produce just enough population to keep themselves 
going. America owes a great debt to Swedish immigrants, for 
instance, not merely in the fact that they have reclaimed much 
territory from the prairie, but—with the other nations of North¬ 
ern Europe—have contributed the best factors to our American 
Christian civilization. Birth Control is confined to those 
northern types almost exclusively, both in their native lands 
and in this country. 

What are to be the religious and moral effects of that? 
That is the big, the serious question. Is the America of the 
future to be Southern European or Northern European in 
the next twenty years? Some years ago, Mr. and Mrs. 
Meyrick Booth published a book on Rudolf Eucken. Here 
are some extracts from that book: 

“The enormous decline in the birth rate which has taken 
place of recent years in Great Britain is seen to possess a 
significance which is not only social, political and economic, 
but philosophical and religious, also; for these classes will 
carry with them into extinction the moral and spiritual be¬ 
liefs of which they are the representatives. Of this process, 
the United States affords a good example; the decay of Purit¬ 
anism in that country has been brought about not so much 
by any intellectual rejection of its beliefs as by the almost 
universally drastic restriction of the family amongst the 
Puritan stocks, which are thus being swamped by the other 
European stocks which came into the country later and which 
are much more prolific; the victory has been not to in¬ 
tellectual considerations but to basic life processes and the 
type of spiritual reality they express.” 



34 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


I hope I am not wearying you, but we are dealing with 
fundamentals and I am very anxious to emphasize their im¬ 
plications. The writers continue: 

“If, for example, we regard the educated Protestant Anglo- 
Saxon as the bearer of a specific type of belief and morality, 
there can be no doubt (even supposing the present birth 
rate to be maintained, which seems improbable) that this 
type is destined to virtually disappear within the next four 
or five generations. For throughout the English-speaking 
world the birth rate is probably more than 20% lower than 
the death rate amongst the more highly educated classes. 
.... The upgoing class consists, in the main, of Roman 
Catholics, in all social grades, some foreign stocks and the 
lower classes in general.We obtain the astound¬ 

ing results that, after not more than four generations, 1,000 
couples taken from the former section (Puritan Anglo-Saxon 
stocks) will be represented by 190 individuals; which amounts 
almost to extinction; while 1,000 Roman Catholic couples 
will have given rise to 6,000 descendants. These figures 
(though only roughly worked out)—say the writers—will 
convey some idea of the startling changes in belief and 
thought which may take place as a result of a differential 
birth rate operating even for a few generations only.” 

I think we ought to remember that one of those four gen¬ 
erations has already passed since that book was written. I 
believe, too, that we are already seeing some of the results 
in the cities of America. 

This is the longest answer I have ever given to a question 
through the microphone. I have given it at such length, 
without touching on some other effects, like the growing degree 
or proportion of selfish people in the population, because it 
is one of the questions of the day. 

There is, of course, another side. The woman has a right 
that has not been admitted until recently, to her own body, 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


35 


with all that that implies. There are individual questions 
that can only be settled by individual treatment and advice 
at the hands of experts of Christian outlook and sound judg¬ 
ment. But, as I have said, my personal mail gives some very 
striking instances of the prevalence of the perfectly shocking 
need of sane leadership in this matter, just as Judge Ben 
Lindsey is showing the danger of a sincerely good man becom¬ 
ing obsessed in his mind by too frequent and concentrated 
thought on this one problem. 


Will the World Become Roman 
Catholic? 

QUESTION: Do you think the whole world will ever 
become Roman Catholic or do you think the moral 
influence of the Catholic church has failed to register? 
What constructive policy do you favor for Protest- 
ants y many of whom admit a waning of popular 
interest in their churches? I am a member of no 
churchy though I criticise no man for his church 
affiliations and ask these questions in all sincerity . 

ANSWER: I am a Protestant because I believe that 
Protestantism fits my temperament. Your question arises 
because of what I said about Birth Control last week. I 
then said that it was being demonstrated that Birth Control 
was chiefly affecting the Protestant stocks and was therefore 
tending to increase the proportion of Catholic units in the 
population. That, of course, is true. I did not say whether 
I thought it was good or bad. 

Naturally, being a Protestant, I think it is not likely to 
be for the perpetuation of the truly American—or, at any 



36 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


rate, the historic American type of civilization. I do not 
think that the choice between Catholicism and Protestantism 
is a choice between good and bad. 

I do not love the hierarchic side of either Catholicism or 
Protestantism and believe that the religion of the average 
member of any church is a more vital thing than its expres¬ 
sion through the leaders of that church; using the word church 
in its large sense and not as applied to the local group of 
worshippers. In that sense, I am not a good Protestant. I 
refuse to denounce the Catholics, and the breathings of threat¬ 
ening and slaughter against Catholics by Protestants is just 
as distasteful and, I believe, harmful, as the breathings of 
threatenings and slaughters against Protestants by Catholics. 
Neither is in accord with the spirit of that Jesus whom they 
both profess to follow. 

I do not think that the world will become wholly Catholic, 
because of two factors. The first is that there are two forces 
in nature, as every engineer knows. The one is centrifugal 
and the other is centripetal. The one is the tendency to cen¬ 
tralization, and in religion, it takes the form of reliance on 
the authority of a church in matters of faith. It is repre¬ 
sented by Catholicism and the High Church party in 
Episcopalianism. 

The other is a de-centralizing tendency, seeking ever a 
wider liberty of thought and judgment in matters of faith and 
conduct. It is expressed—or was expressed by Protestantism. 
The two tendencies will always be at work, in religion as 
in physics and thus, something akin to Catholicism and 
something akin to Protestantism will always be the broad di¬ 
visions of religion. 

Now, Protestantism is undoubtedly declining today through¬ 
out the world, and, chiefly, I think, because it is becoming too 
Catholic and is not sufficiently Protestant—I do not mean, 
in the bigoted sense of active antagonism to Catholicism. I 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


37 


mean that Protestantism does not stand for liberty of thought 
and respect for individual judgment as it once did. Protes¬ 
tantism is just as regimented and Protestant thought is just 
as much in harness today as Catholic thought. 

The sturdy independence of judgment of the old Protestant 
is gone. There are growing up, in a very un-Protestant way, 
church codes of thinking about everything under the sun, from 
the way you wear your hat to whether you should smoke 
cigarettes, if a member of either sex. Protestant people no 
longer read their Bible for themselves. They take their Bible 
knowledge direct from the preacher who is thus forced by 
them, very much against his own will, to become their priest, 
to that degree. Now, I think that is bad for America and 
means the destruction of the old American ideals because 
America was created on a basis of human liberty and inde¬ 
pendence of judgment. 

I am not able to estimate what is the moral influence of the 
Catholic Church. I do not know what strength of passion it 
has to direct and control amongst the South European stocks 
it largely represents. I fancy the warm blood of the South 
is more passionate than our more Northern bloods. If so, 
in the sphere of morals, the Roman Catholic Church has a 
harder task than the churches of the North which are largely 
Protestant. 

I am as amazed as anybody that the Catholic clergy do 
not succeed in stopping the gunplay and other deep crimes 
in this city; such crime being most notoriously perpetrated 
amongst the descendants of South European and Catholic 
stocks. But, as I have said, I do not know what resistance 
there is to the discipline of that church in the blood and 
temperament of the masses of their people. 

I certainly refuse to blame the Catholic priesthood for the 
decline of Protestantism. If Protestantism dies, it will be 
because it deserves to die. Every organization, whether it be 



38 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


a nation or a lodge, dies when the strong conviction that 
gave it birth dies under it. No organization has ever died 
because of attacks from outside. Quite the contrary. 

But I do not think that Protestantism will die, though it 
looks like it just now to those who face the facts and are not 
hoodwinked by statistics. We shall see a revival of indi¬ 
vidual independence within the Protestant churches. Men, 
some day soon, will refuse to accept ready-made, “hand-me- 
down” opinions. This Question Box is intended to be a step 
in that direction. It is an attempt to assist men and women 
to think for themselves. 


Roman Catholicism and the High 
Church Party 

QUESTION: What, in the main, are the distinctions 
between the Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic 
Churches? Do they both recognize the infallibility 
of the Pope? 

ANSWER: The Anglo-Catholic Church is, of course 
the High Church party of the Anglican and Protestant Epis¬ 
copal Church. It had its inception in the fifties of the nine¬ 
teenth century, under the leadership of Dr. Pusey of Oxford 
and of Cardinal Newman while he was still an Anglican 
clergyman. The infallibility of the Pope was not made a 
dogma of the Roman Catholic Church until the day before war 
was declared between Germany and France in 1870. You 
will be interested to know that the vote was taken during 
the most severe thunderstorm that the city of Rome has ever 
experienced. 

The whole bone of contention between the High Church 
and the Low Church party in the churches I have named is 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


39 


this: What were the practises and usages of the English 
Church in the second year of the reign of King Edward VI 
—a purely historical question, made very foggy by the fact 
that the documents are few and doubtful. 

I do not know whether the High Church party now accept 
the infallibility of the Pope. If they do, there is little dis¬ 
tinction between them and the Roman Catholic Church. 
Both believe in the celibacy of the clergy, both believe in 
the Transubstantiation of the Elements of the Sacrament of 
the Lord’s Supper; both believe in the Confessional and in 
that form of Apostolic Succession accepted by the Roman 
Catholic Church; that is, that the gift of ordination conveys 
with it some gift, some special gift derived through St. Peter. 
Many of the clergy of the High Church party have accepted, 
more or less secretly, the ordination by the Papal authorities; 
thus making themselves sure of real ordination, being or¬ 
dained in both churches. 


What Is Meekness? 

QUESTION: Jesus said, Blessed are the meek, for 
they shall inherit the earth. What did he mean by 
“meek”? 

ANSWER: Well, he didn’t mean namby-pamby, be¬ 
cause he was not that himself. Folks forget the Jesus who 
made the whip of cords. There was a lot of real he-man- 
nishness about Jesus of Nazareth and a great power of moral 
indignation. 

I saw the best definition the other day of meekness. 
Strangely enough, it was in an English newspaper. It de¬ 
fined meekness, in the sense that Jesus used it, as unassum¬ 
ingness—and that strikes me as a good definition. Every¬ 
body gives way to the unassuming people. The children 



40 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


make friends with them. It is a very precious and much to 
be envied gift. 

The working man, who shuts up like an oyster at any as¬ 
sumption of pride, opens the wonderful secrets of his handi¬ 
craft to the unassuming. Their difference wins them friends 
everywhere. They enjoy what they have because they have 
no bitterness for what they do not have. In a very real 
and precious sense, they inherit the earth. No millionaire 
owns such treasures. They are the folk without false pride 
or foolish envy and so they enter into their universal in¬ 
heritance. 

It is so frequently true of a man’s treasures, that they own 
him, rather than he them. Not so, with these meek persons, 
upon whom Jesus had his eye. He himself owned nothing 
yet I venture to think that he got more out of the beauty of 
the evening sky than most of us do, and would have revelled 
in a good picture as much as any millionaire possessor of a 
dozen Old Masters. We need to learn from him to revel in 
our Universal possessions. 


Invoking the Aid of the Saints? 

QUESTION: Where is the Biblical authority for 
Catholics invoking the help of the Virgin in their 
praying. My husband , who is a Catholic , does this 
and I argue with him against it. 

ANSWER: I cannot imagine why Protestant wives 
want to argue with Catholic husbands or any other kind of 
husbands about anything. It is a practice which I heartily 
condemn. It’s a different matter, of course, when husbands 
argue with wives. 

But seriously, why risk the love and peace of your home 
by arguing about your husband’s religious practises? There 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


4i 


is no Biblical authority for invoking the Virgin but there is 
no Biblical authority against it. Thank God, madam, that 
your husband prays at all and cease from criticising the 
manner of his prayer. Jews pray with their hats on. Moham¬ 
medans pray prostrate. Many Protestants, as I see them, 
pray while they watch the style of the other woman’s hat. 
There seem to be different methods of praying. 

So long as it is prayer, the method is only of secondary 
importance and any help to devotion is quite legitimate, ac¬ 
cording to the temperament and training of the person pray¬ 
ing. Christ suggests that we all pray ignorantly and says 
that some ask for scorpions when they need eggs and for 
serpents when they need fish. 

If our Heavenly Father were less loving than he is, we 
might be punished by getting what we prayed for. Fortun¬ 
ately, all the crooked lines of prayer are straightened as they 
pass through the intercessory personality of Christ. 

I think I have told my radio friends before that an Indian 
Army officer told me that he once attended a Masonic ban¬ 
quet where many castes dined together but at different tables. 
That was necessary because of that strange caste system. 
But they did all dine within the same room and in the same 
brotherly atmosphere. That was the important fact. 

I have just seen the review of a book devoted to a consider¬ 
ation of the prayer life of World Leaders. Some lived in the 
fifteenth century, some in the twentieth. Some were Cath¬ 
olics, like St. Teresa. Some were rather severely Protestant, 
like Mrs. Beecher Stowe. The reviewer points out that though 
a great gulf might seem to divide St. Teresa from Harriet 
Beecher Stowe, they are singularly alike in their praying, 
both in the manner and in the matter of their praying. 

So it is. We are nearest to each other when we are near¬ 
est to the Divine. When all men are facing the sun, they are 
all facing each other, though half a world away. But argu- 



42 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


ment, especially in the home life, about praying does not 
bring us nearer. It is almost an act of trespass. Instead, 
join your husband in his praying, using your own method of 
approach and, when you do so, don’t forget to thank God you 
have a husband who prays at all. 



Veracity 


QUESTION: How can we be sure that Jesus 
actually spoke the words attributed to him in the 
Gospels? 

ANSWER: It was centuries and centuries before men 
committed their memory of words spoken to writing. It was 
still somewhat uncommon in the East when Jesus was in the 
flesh, as it is there today. The verbal memory of men is 
much better trained by that condition than it is among us 
and there are some very remarkable instances of verbal per¬ 
fection, running to the length of repeating what would re¬ 
quire many pages to print. 

But the method of Jesus was to amplify the words spoken 
to the public in private discussion with his disciples. The 
story of what happened in the case of the parable of the sower, 
told in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, is an instance of 
that and illustrates how the impression would be stamped on 
the minds of the disciples. 

Another instance of the authenticity of the words of Jesus 
is that when they are unfavorable to anybody, they are still 
faithfully recorded, as in the case of Peter being called Satan 
by Christ. If the record had been written up, so to speak, 
that kind of thing would not have appeared. 

It is quite possible, however, that the whole of what we call 
the Sermon on the Mount was not all given to the people at 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


43 


the same time. It may have been a summary of the general 
teaching of Jesus gathered together into one place. That is 
how Luke seems to treat it. 

There is a great deal of evidence that various accounts of 
what Jesus said were checked and corrected. Matthew’s and 
Luke’s Gospels are largely copied from Mark’s Gospel, even 
to the very words. 

The statement at the end of the seventh chapter of Mat¬ 
thew, that he taught as one having authority and not as the 
scribes seems to indicate that the impression his words made 
was very indelible. Remember that all teaching was oral, by 
constant repetition—and that thus, very perfect verbal memo¬ 
ries were obtained. That was a good question. 

Was the World Roman Catholic 
Until Luther? 

QUESTION: Is it true that Peter was the first 
Pope of Rome and that the whole world was Roman 
Catholic until Martin Luther? 

ANSWER: Here is a brief answer to your question, 
just to illustrate how absurd is the kind of thing you have 
been told. There is not the slightest evidence in the New 
Testament that Peter was ever in Rome, though there are 
some traditions. But tradition, by which I mean legend, is 
not history by any means. 

Peter is in Jerusalem until the twelfth chapter of Acts 
when he disappears from the story. The church is existing 
then, before Rome had even been approached by the Chris¬ 
tian evangelists. How could it be Roman Catholic at its 
beginning? 

As for England being Catholic until Martin Luther, have 
you ever heard of John Wycliffe? England was evangelized, 



44 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


not from Rome but from Scotland and Ireland. It was cen¬ 
turies after Columba and Patrick preached Christ there that 
Augustine came to the little tip of England now called Kent 
with a Roman mission. But I should have to write a whole 
history to answer your question. Read John Richard Green’s 
Short History of the English People for the story of religion 
of England. It will show you that the English kings refused 
the domination of the Popes long before Martin Luther, and 
long before the divorce of Henry the Eighth, which was the oc¬ 
casion of the English Reformation. 


Peter’s Denial and Judas’ Betrayal 

QUESTION: What made Peter deny Christ and 
what made Judas betray him? 

ANSWER: Fear made Peter deny Christ—fear coupled 
with hunger, cold and sleeplessness. He was frightened—a 
northern peasant in the metropolis of his nation. He had not 
slept much the night before. The night was cold and he 
was foolish enough to make his face visible in the light of 
that courtyard fire. Then, like all married men, he was afraid 
of women and that servant maid just terrified him. 

The tradition that Mark’s Gospel was written at Peter’s 
dictation, together with the fact that this Gospel gives us 
the most detailed account of Peter’s denial—especially, of 
his use of bad language—should give us added assurance of 
the veracity of Mark’s Gospel, at least. If Mark could so 
faithfully tell the disadvantageous facts, the probability that 
he told the other facts faithfully is that much stronger. 

With Judas, it was different. I have little doubt that 
Judas, the only southerner in the Twelve—all the southerners 
being turbulent and desirous of throwing off the Roman 
yoke—had thought at the beginning that Jesus would develop 




TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


45 


into a military emancipator. When he saw that was not to 
happen, he became sour and critical. John says explicitly 
that he was a thief and that kind of man, with that kind of 
disappointed disposition, was an easy prey to the bribery of 
the Jewish officials. 

The best thing about him was that he hanged himself. I 
mean by that, he was not so far gone that he could not feel 
remorse. It just shows, in his case as in Peter’s, that 

There’s so much bad in the best of us, 

And so much good in the worst of us, 

That it ill becomes the best of us, 

To say much against the rest of us. 


That Younger Generation 

QUESTION: What do you think of the increasing 
attention to dress that seems to characterize the 
younger generation? 

ANSWER: I don’t think you are fair to us older folk 
when you give the younger generation all the credit for an 
increasing attention to dress. Perhaps you did not wish to 
give anybody credit for it all. Perhaps you thought it 
a matter for criticism. Anyhow, keep away from this young 
people stuff. I’m told that sixty per cent of the clients of 
the beauty parlors are over forty-five and the reducing ex¬ 
perts are certainly not making their fortunes from those 
under twenty. We are all making more efforts than ever to 
look well and it is all to the good. 

Plato said that “discord and absence of grace are as nearly 
allied to ill words and ill nature, as grace and harmony are 
the sisters of goodness and virtue.” 

By discord, he meant bad manners, and by absence of 
grace, he meant neglect of the appearance. So, what he 



46 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


really said was that neglect of the appearance was nearly 
always allied with bad manners and that a pride of appear¬ 
ance was allied with grace and courtesy of character. 

I believe that is true. We are members of a widening 
circle of civilized beings. We have to live in the same 
world with them. I fancy we owe it to them to look as 
agreeable to them as we can, both to their eye and to their 
jaded spirits. 

What a blessing it is during torrid days to meet a sanely 
dressed, well poised girl who, in spite of the heat, just refuses 
to be limp and beaten by it. She is making a real contribu¬ 
tion to our general well-being and I feel like cheering every 
such girl I meet. 

That must not be understood to be a defense of the foolish 
overdressing or overcoloring that characterizes the young folk 
in a few instances—and some of the other folk who would 
like us to think them young. 


Should Parents Be Strict? 

QUESTION: I am the mother of a son and daughter 
and am many times perplexed just to know how 
strict to he , so as to retain their love and respect , 
and still have a high standard for their good. Don't 
you think it is a much more difficult task to bring up 
young people in the way of right today than it was 
twenty-five years ago? 

ANSWER: There is a saying that my mother was ac¬ 
customed to use about old maids’ children and bachelors’ 
wives. I forget the rest of it but the effect of the whole say¬ 
ing was that it was easy to criticise other wives and other par¬ 
ents, especially when not a wife or not a parent yourself. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


47 


That is my own position. I am neither a wife nor a parent 
and always feel a little bit timorous about giving rigorous 
advice to folk who know more about these things, experi¬ 
mentally, than I do. It is one of the things that amazes me 
about the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church—I mean, 
their courage in giving advice to wives, husbands and parents. 

But, perhaps, remembering that I was once a child and 
still trying to keep that memory green, I may say something 
to you from that point of view. One of the things that I 
would say is that, forty years ago, I seem to remember that 
my mother used to ask whether it was not more difficult to 
bring up children than it had been twenty-five years before. 
It has always been difficult. 

In the first century, with so much paganism and im¬ 
morality around, it must have been terrible, and from that 
viewpoint, it is likely to be easier now than then. The ap¬ 
palling thing today, as I see it, is that all a child has to do 
is to sulk sufficiently to get anything. Parents seem to be 
making very large sacrifices of authority for the sake of a 
momentary peace. But I say that very humbly. 

It seems almost impossible to take up the task of parent¬ 
hood seriously for the first time after you have been the parent 
of your child for ten or more years. The necessary thing 
appears to a spectator to be, to begin the task of teaching 
your child what your yea and nay mean very early. If the 
psychologists are right, that can scarcely be too early; cer¬ 
tainly before the end of the first year. 

About strictness—this is what I think for what it is worth. 
In all matters of definite principle, you have to be as straight 
and unbending as a steel bar. But matters of principles are 
very few. In all other matters, matters of judgment and opin¬ 
ion, I fancy that once your children are assured of your love 
for them—and I am certain they are—it is a good thing to 
reason and discuss. 



48 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


Persuasiveness, especially the persuasiveness of love, is a 
powerful appeal to a child. God gave us only ten command¬ 
ments, not a hundred. About these, he refuses to argue. But 
about everything else, he says, Come now, and let us reason 
together. 

But I believe in the victory of love. You will not lose the 
respect of your children by your firmness if the lovelight is 
always shining in your eyes. And remember what the Chin¬ 
ese say: God could not be everywhere, so he made mothers. 
God bless you and all mothers everywhere. 


Many Portraits of Christ 

QUESTION: Are there not two portraits of Jesus in 
the Gospels; one of them, the portrait in the first 
three Gospels of a man who spent his life, going 
about doing good; and the other portrait, that of 
John's Gospel, of a supernatural Christ? Which is 
the true one? 

ANSWER: Yes, there are. As a matter of fact, there 
are three portraits of Christ in the New Testament; the two 
you have mentioned and that which Paul presents of the 
Crucified and Risen Lord. 

Which is the true one? Well, I have had several portraits 
taken. In my opinion, none of them does me justice, though 
others think that some of them flatter me. Which is the true 
one? Two were snapped by my wife last week. One shows 
me at my typewriter. Another shows me attired in a bath¬ 
ing suit. Which is the true one? 

The answer is, of course, that they are all true, but that 
none of them is inclusive of the whole man. So it is with 
every portrait of Jesus. He was a man who went about doing 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


49 


good. John, brooding over the fact of the good he had done 
and was still doing, even after his ascension, found that 
the only explanation of such consistent and superlative good¬ 
ness was to be found in the emphasis of his divinity. 

Paul, who had spent the first thirty years of his life in 
achieving moral excellence by the help of Pharisaism and 
its machinery of morality, saw that the death of Christ and 
his triumph over death was the vital thing for him and his 
emancipation from the terrible tyranny of fear and law. 

No portrait of Jesus is a complete one. We need them all to 
get the complete Christ. Personally, I think we need more. 
We shall never see the complete Jesus until we have a portrait 
painted by white men, black men, yellow men; by Magda- 
lenes, Marys, philosophers and redeemed crooks, and one 
final portrait painted by a little child. Then, when the whole 
world has seen him, visioned him, mirrored him, we shall be¬ 
gin to understand what the fulness of Christ really means. 


That Dreadful Younger Generation 

QUESTION: How can you say that the world is 
getting better in view of what we know about the 
younger generation? 

ANSWER: The lady does not state her age in her letter 
but I gather she does not, herself, belong to the younger gen¬ 
eration. Nor do I. I was going to say that I wished I did. 
But I’m not so sure. When I look back on my own youth I 
have a feeling of amazement which I think is shared by all 
honest men and women with any honest memory left; a feel¬ 
ing of amazement that I came through that time of teething- 
rash as well as I did. It wasn’t my fault or to my credit. 
Whatever thanks are due anybody are due my mother and my 
God. 



STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


And I am free to say that the battles I had to fight and the 
snares I somehow escaped were not a tithe as numerous as 
those which modern youth has to meet and escape. We picked 
up a lot of smutty knowledge but we were too sacred of na¬ 
ture to put it into practice. Nobody amongst the well-in¬ 
structed youth of this generation is scared of nature, yet they 
keep remarkably clean. 

If the youth of this generation goes to the dogs, it will 
be for lack of good, self-sacrificing mothers, but I fancy that 
there are nearly as many of them as ever—though, perhaps, 
not quite so many. Meantime, let’s adopt the motto, regard¬ 
ing the youth of this generation: “Fling away your hammer 
and get a horn. ,, Why not boost and cheer a little? They are 
fighting a great battle, and knocking and nagging does more 
harm than good. Let’s give them a cheer—even your daughter, 
madam, or your son, sir. They’re making the grade in much 
greater numbers than you suppose. There are more of them 
away from home than there used to be. There are bigger 
problems and temptations confronting them. 

I’m tired of the denunciation of this old world. Just as this 
answer was being prepared, my wife read this remark from an 
English comic paper. It may surprise you to know they have 
them in England but they do. This is what she read: “Dean 
Inge’s scathing denunciation at the Goldsmith’s Hall, of 
modern life, proves that there are grounds for the widespread 
suspicion that the Dean is not perfectly satisfied with every¬ 
thing.” And that is about all that is proven by denunciation, 
anyway, whether it be the denunciation of a Dean or any of 
the rest of us. Let’s throw that hammer away! 


Absolution 

QUESTION: What does the 23 rd verse of the twen¬ 
tieth chapter of Saint John mean when it makes Jesus 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


5i 


say: whosesoever sins ye remits they are remitted , 
and whosesoever sins ye retain , they are retained? 

ANSWER: That is going to require a long answer. I 
try to avoid controversy and, as students know, that is one 
of the great controversial verses of the New Testament, being 
one of the passages on which the priest bases his sole right to 
give absolution after confession. There seems to be no doubt 
at all that the church has the right given it by Jesus Christ, 
to grant absolution. The verse can mean nothing less. The 
only question is whether that right of the church is centered 
in and confined to the priest. That again, depends on some 
questions of fact. 

It depends, for instance, upon who were present when Jesus 
said this. If only the Apostles were present, then we might 
argue that only those who are the spiritual descendants of 
the Apostles had this right by ordination. On such a matter, 
I prefer to reinforce my own opinion with that of the admit¬ 
tedly greatest authority on John’s Gospel—of the past century, 
at any rate—Bishop Westcott, of Durham. Verse 19 says the 
“disciples were assembled” but “disciples” is often a broader 
term—a more inclusive term than “apostles.” In his account 
of the same incident, Luke in chapter 24 and verse 33 says 
that there were present “the disciples and they that were with 
them.” 

In the first chapter of Acts, those who were with them num¬ 
bered 170, men, women and probably children. So, it was 
the whole company of believing people, not the Apostles only, 
who heard Jesus say this to them. It was an authority given 
to the whole church as a group of believers. That carries the 
implication that all their spiritual heirs, of all the churches 
today, have that right, not just one branch of the believing 
group or one section of its officials. So Westcott says, “The 
main thought which the words convey is that of the reality 



52 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


of the power of absolution from sin granted to the whole 
church, and not of the particular organization through which 
the power is administered.” 

There is nothing in the context, as has been seen, to show 
that the power was confined to any particular group (as the 
Apostles) among the whole company present. The commis¬ 
sion must therefore be regarded properly as the commission of 
the Christian society and not as that of the Christian minis¬ 
try. “Then,” Westcott goes on to say, “the promise, as being 
made not to one but to the society, carries with it of neces¬ 
sity, though this is not distinctly expressed, the character per¬ 
petuity; the society never dies.” Westcott goes on again to 
say, “It is impossible to contemplate an absolute individual ex¬ 
ercise of the power of retaining. . . At the same time the 
exercise of the power must be placed in the closest possible 
connection with the faculty of spiritual discernment conse¬ 
quent upon the gift of the Holy Spirit.” 

The whole church has the gift of absolution; the gift of 
remitting or retaining sins. The whole church is, of course, 
the whole body of believers in Jesus Christ on the earth, at 
any one time in every land and in every language. It is not 
any one branch of the church and it is not any one branch 
of the ministry. Now, I think it is true that the whole world¬ 
wide group of Christian people, Catholic, Protestant, Greek 
Orthodox, Ethiopian, Russian, Indian, Negro Christians—the 
whole world-wide commonwealth of Christ—does determine, 
in a very real way what is and what is not sinful. And I think 
that, generally speaking, the Spirit of God—that Spirit which 
Jesus promised should lead us into all the truth, gradually, is 
leading the whole body of believers all the time, to see what 
sin is. 

There are front ranks of the Christian army, which enter 
into the citadel of truth before the rear ranks. But, ultimately, 
the whole army comes to accept something as sinful. An 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


53 


instance of that is slavery. For eighteen centuries, the church 
and slavery were able to occupy the same bed, more or less 
comfortably. Then, the Spirit began to lead the whole Church, 
in England and America and France, pretty much at the same 
time, and mostly during the lifetime of George Washington, 
into the truth about slavery. 

It has taken a century for the rear ranks of the army to 
catch up, and I am not sure that everybody has, even now,— 
Portugal is not yet sure about giving up slavery. But there 
it is. The same thing is true about alcohol. I am not too old 
to remember when it was thought a good thing by church 
wardens and even by Methodist officials to provide the min¬ 
ister a glass of wine before going into the pulpit so that the 
sermon might be lively; and another when he came down from 
the pulpit, to refresh him. 

Well, that has passed, and there is a growing world-con¬ 
sciousness against alcohol. It is the Spirit leading us into all 
the truth. What was not generally accepted as sinful in one 
century will be accepted as sinful in another. Speaking about 
alcohol, I think we should emphasize that the Spirit leads; he 
does not drive. I think we are apt to drive reforms too much 
in advance of his general leading. There is danger of terrible 
reactions in that. I believe we are seeing some of them in the 
case of Prohibition. 

Turning from that, I think we see the same thing in the 
matter of the treatment of prisoners of war. We talk a lot of 
bitter and foolish things about German treatment of prisoners 
during the late war, but I believe that every warring nation 
treated its prisoners better during that war than any nation, 
including this nation, treated its prisoners during any previous 
war. It is the Spirit leading the general Christian conscious¬ 
ness, throughout the world to new conceptions of what is sinful, 
inhuman, and therefore not in conformity with the divine. 



54 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


That, at least, is what is meant by the whole church remit¬ 
ting and retaining sin and it is perfectly marvelous to consider 
how we have been led to get new conceptions of what is to be 
regarded as sinful, as the centuries have passed. The claim 
made by the church today on the morals of the husband is 
higher than Paul, for instance, ever dreamed for he only in¬ 
sisted that a bishop should be the husband of one wife. Labor 
has come into a position of emancipation that no New Testa¬ 
ment writer would have thought possible and the work is not 
yet finished. It is more true of Jesus Christ than it ever was 
of John Brown that “His soul is marching on.” 

Can a Catholic Be President? 

QUESTION: Can a man who is a Roman Catholic 
become the President of these United States? 

ANSWER: My questioner sends me a newspaper clipping 
from the Literary Digest quoting one of our most respected 
and beloved Methodist preachers, Lynn Harold Hough, as 
saying that he personally does not feel there is any great 
danger from the Catholic Church at this point. “Certainly 
Protestantism has made its own unhappy contribution to the 
forces of reaction,” says Lynn Harold Hough, and goes on— 
“The truth is we must watch every one of the groups, religious 
and secular, in respect of keeping our liberties secure. None 
of us can be trusted with a leadership which is not subjected 
to the inspection of very critical minds.” 

Dr. Hough concludes his address by saying that, “if the 
Catholic candidate is able, otherwise, to qualify for the posi¬ 
tion, let us have no fear in electing him. Nothing will do more 
to create an era of good-will. And there is no wise principle 
that needs be sacrificed.” 

That opinion has created a great deal of controversy and 
I suppose that if I say I agree with Dr. Hough, I shall be mis- 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


55 


understood, also. But I do agree with Lynn Harold Hough. 

I am not discussing personalities because I am not asked to do 
so and should not, if I were asked. What we have to determine 
under this question is, whether the Constitution of these 
United States allows a Catholic to be President. If the Consti¬ 
tution allows that, then it simply remains, as Dr. Hough says, 
whether the individual candidate is otherwise qualified. I think 
we can trust the electors. 

The Constitution says that the President must take the fol¬ 
lowing oath, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute 
the office of President of the United States, and will to the best 
of my ability, protect and defend the Constitution of the 
United States.” According to the Constitution, that need not 
even be in the form of an oath but needs only to be an affirma¬ 
tion—which, again, means, I take it, that even an atheist 
could be President. If an atheist, then certainly a Catholic. 

Of course, the electors must determine whether any indi¬ 
vidual candidate is competent to keep that oath when he 
makes it. But there is no question about the right of a Catholic 
to become a candidate for President. 

What I think all my friends have to realize is that there are 
only two forms of government in the world today to choose 
from. One is a democracy; the other is a dictatorship. Under 
a democracy, you have to take the risk of getting the wrong 
man elected. But you must either take that risk or change 
your form of government. There is no other course. 


Can Murderers Be Saved? 

QUESTION: Taking young Hickman for an ex¬ 
ample, do you think the terrible crime he recently 
committed is any worse in the eyes of God than any 
other breaking of the Ten Commandments? If this 



56 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


boy would simply give his heart to Christ cannot he 
stand as good a chance of gaining a home in Heaven 
as any saint who ever lived? 

ANSWER: You expect an honest answer. I will give it. 
Young Hickman committed a very terrible and revolting crime 
against Society. For that, both as an act of justice which 
Society demands, and as a preventive measure, he will, as 
I expect, receive the just reward of his deeds. He will suffer 
from Society, the punishment that Society demands. 

Rut that crime is also in another sphere. He has offended 
against the family spirit of the kingdom of God. He has done 
it in a certain way. Others have done it in other ways, quite 
as certain. There is no gradation of sin in the New Testament. 
Sin doesn’t have to be physical to be sinful and it doesn’t have 
to be an offence against Society to be sinful. Christ taught 
that the lustful eye committed adultery and the angry heart 
committed murder. 

Concerning the second part of your question, most of my 
answers are only given as the expression of my own opinion, 
but in this case, I can give, with Christ’s own absolute author¬ 
ity, the statement, that whosoever cometh unto him will in no 
wise be cast out. That is all-embracing. It includes Hickman 
and it also includes you and me. 


The Colored Man’s Burden 

QUESTION: Why does the present generation of 
white people hate the present generation of Negroes? 
What can the present generation of Negroes do io 
remove this hate? 

ANSWER: The questioner recites the fact that, in the 
slavery days, the Negroes were faithful to their white masters 




TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


57 


to the very end of that epoch; that they did not commit a 
single act of ruthlessness, even during the Civil War, though 
large sections of white folk still kept them in slavery during 
that time. He reminds me of other virtues of the Negro race 
which were emphasized during the World War but have since 
been ignored. I think we white men ought to be reminded of 
these things. 

But I do not think that the word “hate” is quite the word 
to use. I am not a native-born American and so look at these 
things somewhat as a spectator. I also confess to being a very 
bewildered spectator and, in many respects, an ignorant one. 
Neither, remembering the treatment accorded to men of an¬ 
other color by some white men in India and the East, do I feel 
like accusing American Whites of singular treatment. The 
English are just as contemptuous as the Americans, in their 
own spheres of influence. So, I speak with a certain amount of 
diffidence. 

But I do not think that “hate” is the right word. It is 
rather contempt than hate; a certain attitude of superiority 
which is quite unjustified by the facts. For, of course, the facts 
are that until 1864, and later, the colored people of America 
were almost totally uneducated. Whatever progress they have 
made educationally has been made since that time. The story 
of that progress has been a romance. In sixty years, the 
colored races have come to share, in many spheres, the throne 
with the white man; notably in art, music and drama. 

I think that contempt was somewhat excusable twenty years 
ago. There was a tendency then for the colored man to make 
himself an imitation white man. Imitation may be the sin- 
cerest form of flattery but it always creates contempt in the 
mind of the one who is flattered. The best thing that has hap¬ 
pened lately is the discovery by the colored races of America 
of their own self-consciousness and the fact that they have 
their own separate and distinct means of self-expression. That 



58 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


will mean the ultimate removal of their decreasing “inferiority 
complex,” of which, if I may say so, their complaints of “hate” 
on the part of the white man are a sign. The development by 
the colored man of his own characteristics and the dedication 
of these to the common good are also going to remove the con¬ 
tempt of the Whites. 

Mutual segregation seems an absolute necessity. That seg¬ 
regation is not mutual. The colored folk are forbidden to mix 
with the Whites but the Whites are too disposed to mix with 
the colored in illicit and terrible ways. I sat on the bench with 
the Judge for a whole morning while he was trying cases in 
the Morals Court. Every female defendant was a colored 
woman. It occurred to me then, and seems clear to me now, 
that that is a matter which the colored races ought to take up 
vigorously, exerting every possible effort to the prevention of 
the use of their women by white men for illicit purposes. 

Only the colored races can deal with that problem 
adequately. They ought to exert pressure of the extremest sort 
to prevent members of their own race from bringing their own 
race into that contempt which prostitution always brings. In 
the South, the colored man is much more helpless in that 
particular. 

I am glad to know that colored folk do not hate white folk. 
They must save themselves from that for their own sakes. 
Nothing is so self-destructive as hate. It is always a painful 
experience to carry a Cross. The colored races are still carry¬ 
ing theirs. They will do much if they can still carry their 
Cross heroically. In a wonderful book that has nothing to do 
with the race question but which has a great deal to do with 
Jesus Christ, the writer recently said about Christ, “Christ 
drank to the dregs the cup of disappointment and despair. 
Isaiah’s words: ‘A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,’ 
appropriately describe him; but he did not pathetically call 
attention to the fact.” 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


59 


Then, what I think is a great sentence and a great moral 
statement: “He wore but did not advertise a crown of thorns. ,, 
(Streeter, “Reality,” page 195.) When the colored races can 
imitate their Lord and carry their crown of thorns heroically, 
bravely, sweetly, I believe that the day of their complete 
emancipation will be at hand. 


Religion and Moral Concepts 

QUESTION: Do our religious conceptions really 
matter as a basis for conduct? Cannot a man do 
right without having right thoughts about God? 

ANSWER: A man may but a nation cannot. The man 
may because he will (whether he appreciates the fact or not) 
be affected in his standards of morality by the national moral 
standards surrounding him. His is a kind of borrowed moral¬ 
ity. But if a nation loses its rightness of thought about God, 
the atmosphere which that nation breathes—I mean the moral 
atmosphere—will grow foul and the nation will die. 

Rome worshipped a very masculine God named Jupiter and 
the whole life of that nation became a worship of mere brute 
strength and cruel force which destroyed it at last because 
the things that womanhood and childhood stand for, purity, 
tenderness, trust, died from out the life of the nation. 

Greece worshipped Venus, the merely beautiful in form. 
Greece died of syphilis. Germany , in the twenty years before 
the Great War worshipped a monster of blood and iron. The 
ruthless subjugation of the individual to the State destroyed 
the old Germany, though a newer and finer Germany is 
emerging—something like the old, fine nation that existed 
before 1866. 

So it goes. Our real issue with the Rationalists is whether 
man is a being with freedom of will. If he is not, then 



6o 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


it is silly to punish the Ruth Snyders or the Hickmans at all— 
even with one day of imprisonment. It is silly to hunt gunmen. 
If there is no freedom of will, there is no choice left to man. 
That means that the real crook is the policeman who tries to 
hold a man responsible for his crimes, in spite of the defence 
attorneys. There would be no civilization or progress if there 
were no insistence on freedom. So, it is obvious that religious 
concepts matter to conduct. Nothing else does matter if they 
do not. 


Where Are the Dead? 

QUESTION: According to your understanding of 
the Bible, where are the dead, that is, those who have 
died in Christ: are they in Heaven with the angelic 
hosts or are they asleep until the time of Christ's 
second coming? 

ANSWER: In all matters relating to the spirit world, 
human language is struggling to express something beyond its 
limited powers. That is true of Bible language also. More¬ 
over, the Oriental mind, especially, delights to think in terms 
of pictures and the Hebrew minds of the writers of the New 
Testament were Oriental so that there is much imagery, of 
necessity, in the New Testament. Yet again, they, like our¬ 
selves, inherited a great number of preconceptions from their 
forefathers which they had not entirely shed when they wrote. 

So, we should always beware of reading descriptions both of 
the destiny of the blessed and descriptions of the destiny of 
the condemned, with the literalness of Western minds. All 
such expressions as a thousand years and descriptions of ma¬ 
terial harps and feasts are to be taken allegorically, of course. 
It is simply wooden to do otherwise. 




TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


61 


By the same rule—coming to a definite answer to your 
question—I think we must dismiss the time element from all 
thought about the spirit world. The modern psychologists 
say that even the mortal mind we have here does not know 
time except in an acquired way. When we talk about today 
and tomorrow and when we talk about what is past or pres- 
sent, we are simply talking about something that applies only 
to our own sphere. 

Those who were in Christ are in Christ. They are not asleep. 
They live, gloriously and actively in his unveiled presence 
They did that here in his veiled presence. Nothing hap¬ 
pened to them in death except that the veil concealing him 
was taken away. The result for them is not sleep but more 
ecstatic life, more abundant and manifest life. 


Unbelief and Disbelief 

QUESTION: Do you see any difference between 

Un-Belief in the Scriptures and Dis-Belief? 

ANSWER: All the difference in the world. Disbelief is 
simply not believing. There is no sin in it. Christ never 
complained and does not now complain because some man or 
woman does not believe in our dogmas about him. What he 
asks is, that we believe in him; not that we believe in the 
dogmas about him. 

Unbelief is the refusal to believe in Jesus Christ; in his 
goodness, his Lordship, his purity. A man can love his wife 
without believing the wonderful stories about her family hav¬ 
ing come over in the Mayflower or the Ark. That may 
be disbelief and need have nothing to do with his love for 
her. But if he doesn’t believe in his wife herself—that is 
unbelief. 



62 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


Are Prayers Answered? 

QUESTION: My experience is that prayers are not 
answered. In what way can we assure ourselves 
that sincere , worth while prayers will he answered? 

ANSWER: Well, you have to pray right. You know 
the story about the little boy who prayed for the bicycle. 
His parents heard him praying. They thought he was too 
young for a bicycle and decided to buy him a tricycle. When 
it arrived, they told him to go into the barn and see what 
God had sent him. He was gone longer than they had ex¬ 
pected and so they crept in after him. He was on his knees, 
saying to God, “Dear God, I’m much obliged but I DID 
think YOU would know the difference between a bicycle and 
a tricycle.” 

God does; but we make a mistake when we think of prayer 
as a definite request for definite things. It may be that, but 
always with the reservation, however, that God’s will be 
done; not ours. But requesting is not the highest type of 
prayer. There is very little requesting in the Lord’s Prayer. 
Why not take a pencil and paper and write down, under 
each other, the various petitions in two columns; those that 
ask for the glorification of God and those which relate only 
to our own affairs? 

Bread to carry life along, forgiveness for the past, the 
shielding love of God in our combats with evil in the future 
—that is all that belongs to the list of things we ask for 
ourselves in the model prayer. The rest is for the glorifica¬ 
tion of God. And when we get those proportions into our 
living and into our prayers we shall find our prayers answered. 

When we live for the glory of God, and work for the glory 
of God, and pray for the glory of God, we shall find prayer 
being answered in an ever increasing way. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


63 


What Is Perfection? 

QUESTION: What did Jesus mean, in the Sermon 
on the Mount, when he said, “ Ye, therefore, shall be 
perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect?” 
There does not seem to be any standard of compari¬ 
son by which the Father and ourselves can be com¬ 
pared . 

ANSWER: Well, a father and a son can always be com¬ 
pared because they are of the same family, of the same nature 
and of the same general disposition. And it is important 
to notice that it is the word Father that Jesus uses, so that 
here, as everywhere else, he assumes that family relationship 
and that family resemblance. That is the first fact. 

The second is this, that the word, “perfect” which Jesus 
used is the Greek word “teleos.” That means, really, the 
adaptation to ends. What Jesus said was, just as your 
Father does so perfectly fulfil the end for which he exists— 
if I may use that expression without misunderstanding—so 
may you; so should you, fulfil the end for which you exist. 
Your task is smaller than his but you can do it just as per¬ 
fectly; even as the oiler can do his work as perfectly as the 
captain of the ship. 

What Jesus really said, to put it still another way, was, 
live up to the limit of your possibilities. You cannot live up 
to the limit of his possibilities and nobody expects you to do 
so. Live up to the limit of your own. 

The dewdrop is not the ocean but it can reflect all the 
amazing colors of the ocean. A skylark is not an organ but 
it can sing in high heaven, for all that. A lily is not a glori¬ 
ous pine tree but it can bloom up to the limits of its possi¬ 
bilities of blooming. 



64 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


And that, as I understand it, is what Jesus meant. But 
there is this wonderful thing about anything that Jesus said, 
that it has meanings and possibilities of reflection beyond 
anything I can think. If you meditate upon the words of 
Christ, you can find added and richer meanings. I hope you 
will be able to do this. 


Were the Brothers of Jesus Unfriendly? 

QUESTION: Kindly explain Matthew, chapter 
XIII and verse 55 ; also Mark, chapter VI and verse 
3 . Any Roman Catholic that I have spoken to on 
the subject says that our Lord's Mother was always a 
virgin. Now, if she had four other sons, as the above 
verses lead me to believe, why did our Lord when on 
the cross give her over to the care of John who was 
not one of her sons? 

ANSWER: Matthew, chapter XIII, verse 55 says, “Is 
not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? 
And his brethren, James and Joseph and Simon and Jude? 
And his sisters, are they not all with us?” Mark, chapter 
VI, verse 3 reads in exactly the same way. 

Well, there it is. Does it mean what it says? If it does 
not, what is the use of reading anything at all. Nothing is 
plainer or more positive. Catholic and Protestant both de¬ 
rive their information from the Gospels. The only informa¬ 
tion fairly to be derived from that and every other reference 
to Mary that has a bearing on her motherhood implies that 
she had several children. 

But about his giving her into the care of John at the 
Cross; if you read Mark III and verses 31 to 35, you will 
see that there is a lack of sympathy between Jesus and his 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


65 


brothers—not the first nor the last time in history that has 
happened. At first, Mary herself seems to have been af¬ 
fected by it as that passage showed. But later, she is found 
amongst the women who constantly were with him, com¬ 
pletely identifying herself with his cause. Neither is that 
unusual. His brothers were not at his cross. She was and 
John was. What more natural than that he should give some¬ 
body who was actually there the care of his mother in prefer¬ 
ence to those who were not there? 

After the Resurrection, he showed himself to his broth¬ 
ers, according to Paul. The result of that was that they 
came in and you find them in the first chapter of Acts, 
amongst the group waiting for Pentecost. That all seems 
very human and very feasible to me. 

Why does the Roman Catholic Church insist on the per¬ 
petual virginity of Mary? The answer is that all round the 
coasts of the Mediterranean, from the beginnings of history, 
there has been a pagan worship of a virgin mother—though 
not always virgin. 

The Roman Catholic Church has always pursued the policy 
of appropriating the pagan and associating it with Christian¬ 
ity to make the transition from paganism more easy for pagans 
and to more easily secure the Christian baptism of pagan 
tribes and peoples. It did that with the old pagan festivals 
of Yule-tide, and with the pagan Spring-time festival of Greece 
of which the Easter egg is a direct descendant. Candlemas, 
Michaelmas and other feasts are mostly appropriated pagan 
festivals from which they were descended and incorporated into 
Christianity in order to follow the line of least resistance—that 
is why the old Scotch folk, who were so opposed to Rome, re¬ 
fused to observe the Easter and Christmas festivals, because 
they knew they had descended through Rome from paganism. 

In exactly the same way, Roman Catholicism, a Mediter¬ 
ranean religion, appropriated the old pagan worship of the 



66 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


virgin mother and that is what Madonna worship means 
today. Ask any unbiased historian if this is not so, or if you 
want authoritative information, read Sir James Fraser’s “Gold¬ 
en Bough.” 

Free Will and Omniscience 

QUESTION: How do you explain the theory of an 
omnipotent God and mans free will? The best ex¬ 
planation I have heard so far is that we cannot hope 
to understand such a confusing question in this life. 

ANSWER: It is evident that my brother is not satisfied 
with the explanation that we cannot hope to understand what 
he calls this confusing question in this life. I do not think 
we ought to be satisfied with such an answer. I suppose that 
once folk thought it was of no use to try to fly because God 
never intended man to do so. 

However impossible the answer to a question seems to be, 
I think we ought to seek an answer. The minds of men, as 
well as their souls, are growing all the while and they grow by 
struggling with questions that seem, at first, too big for them. 
This week, I saw a baby trying to lift a ten-pound weight. 
She was of the female persuasion so kept on trying in spite 
of her weakness. She did not succeed but if she keeps at 
it, she will develop muscles that will enable her to do it some 
day. It is like that with our mental and spiritual struggles. 

Now, I think that the explanation of that difficulty about 
God’s omnipotence and man’s free will is this: When God 
created man he deliberately sacrificed his omnipotence in 
order to have a free being in the universe who, because of 
his freedom, could become, in some measure, a companion 
with himself. God is not omnipotent in man’s affairs, in my 




TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


67 


judgment. And he is not omnipotent because he, himself, 
deliberately limited his own omnipotence in order to give his 
love to somebody to woo, if I may use that expression. 

Neither God nor man could woo a machine, which is what 
a man without free will would have been. God took all the 
risks involved in limiting his own omnipotence and the re¬ 
sponsibility he assumed by that act was the responsibility of 
letting man do harm in his universe. It looked at first as 
if man were going to do nothing but harm, but God came to 
the rescue again in Jesus Christ and by Christ’s coming said, 
“How shall I give thee up, O House of Israel?” He has never 
done that and the ultimate result will be the complete justi¬ 
fication of God’s self-limitation of his omnipotence and 
omniscience. 

How Should We Fear God? 

QUESTION: Why should we fear God? 

ANSWER: That question is abbreviated from a very 
interesting and kindly letter which I much appreciate. There 
is only one reason why we should fear God. It is found in 
Psalm 130, and the fourth verse, “There is forgiveness with 
thee, that thou mayest be feared.” It is exactly the same 
reason that I had for fearing my mother more than my 
father in the far-back days when they were both with me 
visibly. If I did anything wrong he, being an old-fashioned 
father, would tan my hide. She, being an old-fashioned 
mother, would grieve lest my peccadillos might indicate that 
I was going to make a wreck of my life. 

My body shrank from the humiliation and the loss of dig¬ 
nity that his stick might cause me, along with the physical 
pain. But my soul just shrank from giving my mother cause 
to weep about me and pray to God for me. 



68 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


I hated rousing his anger. But I dreaded arousing her 
grief much more. I was afraid of the outraged love of my 
mother which seldom expressed itself in anger but in prayer- 
in real, not sentimental grief. That is the kind of fear, the 
only kind of fear we need have for God. The heart of the 
Eternal is most wonderfully kind and it is a grievous thing 
to try to break that heart again. 


Has a Still-Born Baby a Soul? 

QUESTION: Has a still-born baby a soul? 

ANSWER: I am assuming that that question comes 
from somebody really anxious for some deep personal rea¬ 
son for a reply. A lady asks the question and there may 
be a world of regret and anxiety behind the enquiry. 

The lawyers hold, I believe, that a child has a separate 
existence from the fourth month of its pre-natal existence. 
A separate existence pre-supposes a separate soul. Personally, 
I do not know and I have never had a personal reason for 
asking myself the question. In any case, I put that question 
where I put so many others, in the hands of Christ, know¬ 
ing it is safe there for an answer that must be richer and 
more final than any I could give. 

In the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, those 
scholars who are called the Schoolmen used to spend weary 
months and even years debating questions like that, not al¬ 
ways with Christian sweetness. I hope we are wiser nowa¬ 
days. It ought to be enough that Jesus said, “Suffer the 
little children to come unto me,” if the soul is there, as I be¬ 
lieve it is. 

About all questions of the after life we know very little. 
We know nearly as little about the soul itself. It is a new 
territory which the human mind is only just beginning to 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


69 


explore. But concerning all those questions, I’m glad I 
learned Tennyson’s great poem in my youth before my 
memory became too crowded with other things and that I 
especially learned to say about my departed dear ones, with 
Tennyson (slightly changed): “I trust he lives with Thee and 
there I find him worthier to be loved.” 


God’s Method of Forgiveness 

QUESTION: Would you say it is a divine law that 
unless we forgive , we cannot expect God's forgiveness? 
Did Paul state God's method of forgiveness when he 
said in Ephesians , chapter IV and verses 26 and 28 , 
we were to he angry hut sin not? Does the first 
chapter of Isaiah and the eighteenth verse , where God 
says , 11 Though your sins he as scarlet , they shall he 
as white as snow" indicate that all sin is forgiven hy 
return to God? 

ANSWER: Those are just a few of the questions that 
my friend asks me. I shall have to try to answer them to¬ 
gether. The teaching of Christ undoubtedly is that we can¬ 
not expect forgiveness unless we are forgiving. Why should 
we? I was going to say that we hardly needed Christ to tell 
us that we cannot expect that treatment from anybody that 
we are not, ourselves, willing to accord. 

The teaching of Jesus is not confined to that passage. He 
taught the same thing in many places; for instance, where 
he told the story of the man who owed 500 pence and ex¬ 
pected forgiveness but refused to forgive the man who only 
owed him 50 pence. It is too much to expect of human 
nature that it shall be entirely consistent, but that consistency 
is demanded when it comes to our expecting God to forgive us 



70 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


for sins that are more hideous as treacheries than any treach¬ 
ery of which our neighbor can be guilty against us. 

As to what Isaiah contains of the truth of forgiveness, the 
reference there is to national sin. Isaiah is speaking to the 
whole Jewish nation. But the principle applies. When God 
forgives, he forgives absolutely without any reservation what¬ 
ever. It is the only way to forgive. 

God comes to forgive us because of his own infinite love 
for us and for no other reason. But because there are great 
universal laws involved, he himself chose Christ as his rep¬ 
resentative to us and as our representative to him, making 
him the mediator, the plenipotentiary, (like nations have with 
each other) to create that atmosphere where forgiveness would 
be possible and the righteousness as well as the love of God 
vindicated. 


Is H. L. Mencken Good For Us? 

QUESTION: What do you think is the influence of 
H. L. Mencken in the life of America? Is it good or 
had? 

ANSWER: Almost altogether good, if you take it right. 
It’s as good as turkey rhubarb, or bitter aloes or nasty medi¬ 
cine of that kind; it’s good like a gale amongst rotten 
branches. It reveals to us the rotten places, shakes our vul¬ 
gar complacencies, and that is always good. 

But it’s bad for Mencken. To be always critical and de¬ 
structive and a seeker after the wrong and ugly is always 
bad for anybody, even for a reformer—and Mencken is not 
that. It gets us into a condition of distorted vision and nar¬ 
rowed faith in humanity. Moreover, it’s the kind of thing 
that anybody can do if he has enough vitriol in his disposi¬ 
tion and enough gall in his ink. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


7i 


But it is good for us. There are times when I almost want 
to read him on my knees and cry, with Richard Baxter as 
he saw the poor wretch being haled off to execution, “There, 
but for the grace of God, goes Richard Baxter. ,, 


Christ and the Psalms 

QUESTION: I find a resemblance between the words 
of Christ on the Cross and the 22 nd Psalm. Am I 
justified in thinking there is any resemblance? 

ANSWER: You have every justification in the world. 
At the Temptation, Jesus used nothing but Scripture in re¬ 
plying to the Devil and you will find it interesting to check 
up on the marginal references to corroborate that. The story 
is in Matthew’s Gospel and the 4th chapter. 

That makes it look as if it was the habit of Christ to con¬ 
stantly refresh his mind by the repetition of Scripture, espe¬ 
cially the Psalms. He certainly did so on the Cross and there 
is not the least doubt that the words, “My God, My God, 
why hast thou forsaken me,” being, as they are, the first 
words of the 22 nd Psalm, were also the beginning of his 
repetition of that Psalm to himself as he hung there. If you 
read the whole Psalm, you will see how perfectly that Psalm 
fits his dying condition. It is almost a description of what 
took place at the Cross, though written at least 700 years 
before. 

Does Broadcasting Hurt Religion? 

QUESTION: Does not the broadcasting of Sunday 
morning services tend to have a serious and harmful 
effect on the congregations where broadcasting, is 
not practised and thus become harmful to religion? 



72 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


ANSWER: No—the sooner the Protestant churches re¬ 
alize what a small minority of the people are attending the 
House of God, the better. The facts are appalling—like a 
lot more of the facts that we blind ourselves to. I have 
again and again said that in the ward where this church is 
situated, there are more than 70,000 persons residing. There 
are three thousand more persons living in the ward this year 
than last. Next year, there will be three thousand more. 
There are not more than 8400 pew sittings in all the churches 
of the ward, including Catholic, Protestant, Lutheran, Greek 
Orthodox. That means that there is only accommodation for 
slightly more than ten percent of the population. 

But this ward is more highly favored than most because 
it contains two of the largest churches in the city. In other 
wards, the average of sittings is likely to be even smaller, 
therefore. Yet I am going to say that not half the sittings 
provided are used by the people. Why walk blindfold? The 
facts are unpleasant but that is not a reason for burying our 
heads in the sand. Are the churches afraid of a religious 
census? Fools may laugh at the terrible results that a census 
will reveal, but wise men, when they connect the facts dis¬ 
closed with the other facts about divorce, gun-toting, crime 
growth and dope peddling, together with the general loosen¬ 
ing up of sexual morality, will both weep and bestir them¬ 
selves. 

The fact is that we are in a position exactly similar to that 
prevailing in England throughout the first half of the eight¬ 
eenth century. Most of the people were outside the churches 
—and the churches did not care. Wesley and his helpers 
decided to go out to the people, since they would not come 
in to him. The churches cursed him but the churches were 
saved and civilization was saved also. 

The radio is God’s gift to religion for its reclamation in 
this century. It is our duty to use it. The people need it as 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


73 


a means of conveying religious—as distinct from sectarian 
—truth. They do not merely need it but are showing that 
they want it by listening in, in greater numbers every week. 
It is the people, not the churches, who need our first 
consideration. 

The radio gives them a new chance to be brought into 
touch with prayer, Christian song and Christian teaching. 
There is undoubted evidence that they are availing them¬ 
selves of the opportunity. That is the only justification 
needed. 


Broadcasting Religion a Sign 
of Revival 

QUESTION: Do you believe that the preaching of 
the Gospel by radio is a favorable or an unfavorable 
sign of the times? 

ANSWER: Altogether favorable. There are ten times 
more folk listening to this question box than this church 
would accommodate. More than half of them are not in¬ 
terested in churches at all and hate ecclesiastical religion. 
But every single one of them is interested in Jesus Christ, 
who is still fulfilling his prophecy, “I, if I be lifted up, will 
draw all men unto me.” 

Until the radio came, these folk who did not like churches 
were cut off from Christ in large measure. Today, they 
have their interest kindled. 

Even if the people wanted to go to church, there are not 
enough churches for them in the big cities, though there are 
too many in the small ones. In this ward of the city, there 
are 70,000 persons and church sittings—Catholic, Protestant, 
Greek Orthodox and the other 57 varieties—yet the sittings 




74 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


in church pews do not exceed 8400. What about the rest if 
the Gospel is of universal application and belongs to everybody? 

Religion is only vital when it goes out into the street. A 
Christianity that merely belongs to churches, academies, 
withdrawn places, and which just makes itself intelligible to 
those who were trained to understand its vocabularies, is 
dead. Every now and again, it has a resurrection which we 
call a revival. Then, it gets out amongst the people once 
more. 

The folk who believe it belongs to churches and elect per¬ 
sons, only, always object to it doing so. They objected to 
Francis of Assissi preaching in the highways and byways. 
They objected to Luther bringing the story of Jesus into 
the streets. They objected to Wesley daring to talk about a 
withdrawn thing like religion from his father’s tombstone and 
in densely packed crowds. They stoned General Booth be¬ 
cause he dared to preach from street corners. 

The same breed condemns the radio because it does the 
same thing, bringing the Gospel out of the shadows into the 
sunlight and dust of common life and applying it there. They 
are not all to be found, these hidebound folk, in any one 
faith or any one church. They are the traditionalists of all 
the churches. 

There is another big thing that radio is doing which is in 
the historic line of all real revival of religion. When the Mac- 
cabean revival of Judaism took place 150 years before Christ, 
men demanded that the sacred book of their faith should be 
translated out of the sacred language of Hebrew into the 
common Greek they spoke. Thus came the Septuagint. 
Francis broke with the same tradition and expressed his sense 
of the same urge when he wrote his songs and sermons in na¬ 
tive Italian and his mother’s native French instead of pious 
Latin. Luther, Wycliffe, Tyndale, all felt the demand to 
translate the Word of God out of time-worn formulae into 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


75 


the common tongue. So did Wesley in a different way when 
he started the Methodist Book Concern. 

Radio is necessitating the same thing. We are having to 
speak to men and women who simply do not know the mean¬ 
ing of definitely religious words and phrases. The Gospel is 
becoming more homelike, more convertible into the thought- 
forms of ordinary men without a definitely religious vocab¬ 
ulary. That is going to save religion and save the world. 
We are marching along the tracks of these air-waves, right 
along the true historic road, and are definitely in line with 
the age-long purposes of God. 


America’s Five Greatest Preachers 

QUESTION: Who were the five greatest preachers 
that the United States have produced? 

ANSWER: That is entirely a matter of opinion and my 
opinion is worth no more, in a matter of opinion, than any¬ 
body else’s, but I should say: Jonathan Edwards —a very nar¬ 
row person but a truly great preacher; Cotton Mather —a 
very vain person who wrote 382 books which is 370 too many 
for most men to write. He became too interested in witch¬ 
craft and was the cause of many folk unnecessarily dying, 
but he was an amazing preacher; Phillips Brooks —the 
greatest preacher of them all; Henry Ward Beecher —who 
spoiled his amazing gifts as a preacher by his lecturing tours. 

I should put Dwight L. Moody last, but certainly amongst 
the five. His simplicity concealed a great art and a great 
genius. His influence was greater than that of any two of 
the other four, in my opinion. But he is being very falsely 
represented today, by his alleged followers, who are nothing 
like so big in their conceptions of the kingdom of God as 
he was. 



76 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


Fundamentalists and Modernists 

QUESTION: What are the real points of difference 
between the Fundamentalists and the Modernists? 

ANSWER: If I were as brave as I sometimes think 
myself I should say that the chief difference between Mod¬ 
ernists and Fundamentalists is that the Modernists are drunk 
with the new wine of the marvelous scientific discoveries of 
the past fifty years while the Fundamentalists are still cling¬ 
ing to the grave-clothes of old traditions and stick-in-the-mud 
theologies. They are both very unfortunate in their leaders, 
who seem to have spent very little time at the feet of Jesus 
learning his meek and gentle spirit. 

The average Modernist is far too disposed to sacrifice 
fundamental theological necessities like the absolute divinity 
of Jesus Christ, our Lord. The Fundamentalist is sometimes 
too disposed to damn everybody who does not believe that 
the first chapter of Genesis is literal history or the last chapter 
of Revelation a scale plan of Heaven. In such extreme cases, 
both are bigots and, as such, are a danger to the kingdom 
of God. 


Christianity Not a Set of Prohibitions 

QUESTION: Can you discuss for us the Truth in 
“Dowieism” as preached and practised at Zion , 
Illinois? It prohibits the use of pork products, 
oysters , doctors , drugs, on a basis of Christian ethics; 
also vaccination. How could they ignore a state or 
county order on small pox, scarlet fever , etc? 

ANSWER: I’m sure I don’t know if, or how, Zion, Illinois, 
ignores state orders. I am not free to discuss Dowieism. I can 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


77 


only state my own belief—that Christianity is not a series of 
prohibitions against this or that. It is the kind of life that 
demands that we love the Lord our God with all our heart, 
mind, strength and soul—and our neighbor as ourselves. 

It is positive—not negative—and the greatest hinderers to 
its progress are those who think that every time they display 
a notice to keep off the grass they are doing the will of God. 
Moreover, any teaching that ignores the gift of God in the 
form of progressive medical and sanitary science is simply 
denying the most significant revelation that God is making 
of himself in our modern civilization outside of the Scriptures. 

When will we learn, I wonder, to stop picking holes in the 
habits of our neighbor as to pork or tobacco or doctors and 
get down to the business of living unto our own Master—a 
task big enough for any and all of us? 

As for doctors, Paul had his private physician, Luke, and 
Christ himself, in the story of the Good Samaritan and in 
his own practice, sanctioned and used at least primitive and 
simple medical means for the recovery of sick folk. That 
does not preclude the certainty of what we call faith-healing 
so long as it goes hand in hand with common-sense medical 
practice, and care. 

As for pork, Peter was taught, pretty plainly that that 
kind of prohibition did not belong to the Christian regime. 
Christ taught plainly that it was not what went into our 
mouths but what came out of them that defiled them and us. 

The Elephant and Five Blind Men 

QUESTION: Your expressions on Modernism and 
Fundamentalism given over the radio this afternoon 
struck me as coming from one who was bursting with 
ego; whose mind , when expressed , was final. Am 1 
right? 



78 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


^4 ANSWER: Let me tell my friend a little story about five 
blind men who went to interview an elephant. One of them 
felt of his trunk and said, The elephant is a kind of serpent. 
Another felt of his tail and said, No, the elephant is a kind of 
rope. Another felt of his leg and said, You are both wrong, 
the elephant is a kind of tree. Yet a fourth felt of his ear 
and said, Everybody is wrong. The elephant is like a flap¬ 
ping tent. The fifth said, Why cannot you fellows see the 
truth, I have leaned against his side and the elephant is a 
kind of house. 

Unfortunately, that is not the end of the story for they got 
to quarreling and the real end of the story is that at the end 
of the quarrel, there were five blind men dead and one live 
elephant. 

Once again I quote my little text: The fruits of the Spirit 
are love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith¬ 
fulness, meekness, temperance.” 

The Wise Men and the Star 

QUESTION: Will you tell me the names of the three 
Wise Men who discovered the Star? 

ANSWER: There isn’t the faintest proof that there were 
only three wise men. There may have been thirty or three 
hundred. What Matthew says is that “when Jesus was born 
in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of Herod the King, be¬ 
hold, wise men came from the East to worship him.” The 
number is not stated but because it is stated that they gave 
three gifts—gold, frankincense, and myrrh, it has been as¬ 
sumed that there were three of them. Even their names are 
traditional and fanciful. The names are Belshazzar, Melchior 
and Caspar. They were supposed to be buried at Constanti¬ 
nople; their bodies afterwards being removed to Cologne, in 
Germany, where they are said to be to this day. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


79 


The big thing about them is that they were probably (al¬ 
most certainly) Eastern astrologers serving in the courts of 
Eastern kings; that they had a certain amount of wisdom and 
brought this lesser wisdom and laid it as their tribute, at the 
feet of Jesus, the Greatest of the Wise throughout the ages. 


Sunday Movies 

QUESTION: Have you seen that a majority of the 
citizens of my town have voted for Sunday movies? 
If so, do you think this is right? Can you give a 
“ Yes” or “No” answer? 

ANSWER: That depends on what you mean by “this.” 
It is one of those questions to which there can be no answer 
until the question itself has been better defined. There are 
many questions to which it is impossible to answer, “Yes” or 
“No.” One of them is the question, Have you left off beat¬ 
ing your wife? If you answer, “Yes,” then you admit that 
you once did so. If you answer, “No” then, the question is, 
“Why haven’t you?” 

Now, I think it wrong for the citizens of your town or of 
any place to vote for Sunday movies. They are entirely un¬ 
necessary in any community nowadays when movie theatres 
are open every day at least twelve hours. The secularization 
of Sunday is one of the symptoms of the decreasing respect 
that modern civilization has for the Christian religion. That 
growing disrespect will ultimately involve the destruction of 
our Western civilization by another more Puritanical civili¬ 
zation. That will follow as surely as history is history—and 
as surely as God is God. It is written in the stars and it is 
written across every page of our long, human story. In that 
sense, the movement in favor of the relaxation of the healing 
simplicities of the Sabbath is wrong. Added to that, it is 



8o 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


always wrong for folk to add to the Sabbath employment of 
others for their own amusement. 

But, if you mean is it right for a thing for which a major¬ 
ity of the people have voted to be brought into actuality, 
then the answer is “Yes.” Sumptuary laws—as they are 
called—laws to prevent the people saying what they shall or 
shall not have, are always mischievous, and ultimately they 
always defeat their own ends. 

Government of the people, for the people, by the people is 
the highest ideal of human government yet achieved and it 
is probably the highest ideal of government that ever will be 
achieved. We have got to take the risks of it, whatever they 
are. If the people vote wrong, it is the fault of their moral 
education which means that it is largely the fault of the 
preachers and the churches. 

The way for preachers to remedy that state of things is not 
for preachers to be more political in their preaching but for 
them to be less so and more Biblical, more spiritual. It is 
the iron in the Bible getting into the blood of men that makes 
them strong to do right things and vote right things. 


Sunday and Sabbath 

QUESTION: I am a Christian believer though I 
belong to no particular denomination . Being a shut- 
in , I depend very much on your services and your 
interpretations . Here is a question that has much 
perplexed me: Is Sunday the Sabbath which God in¬ 
tends Christians to keep? If so, how can I prove it? 

ANSWER: The Jewish Sabbath was the last day of the 
week. That was not our Saturday because the calendar has 
been changed several times since the ancient days of Moses. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


81 


The last time it was changed was just before George Wash¬ 
ington was born. The reason it has been changed so often is 
because the sun refuses to do its work with the earth in ex¬ 
actly 365 days and needs a few more hours each year to do 
that work. There is thus an accumulation of hours through 
a series of years which have to be made up somehow. We 
make it up at present by adding every fourth year, to the 
number of days in the year. That has caused the various 
changes in the calendar and has caused us to lose the an¬ 
cient Jewish Sabbath; which, for all we now know, may be 
Wednesday or Friday. 

The first day of the week is not the same first day of the 
week it was when Jesus was in the flesh. But we keep it in 
memory of him. It happened to be the day of the week on 
which the early church celebrated his resurrection by meet¬ 
ing together and, as far as possible, abstaining from work. 

It’s a good hygienic practice to abstain from work one day 
in the week and there is a consensus of opinion that this 
should be the day. We owe something to Jesus. I think we 
owe everything to him. The early church thought so, too. 
So, out of love for our Lord we keep that day, without being 
compelled to. Compulsion is always wrong when it comes to 
the observing of any religious custom. Laws governing re¬ 
ligious observance are always retroactive and deprecatory. 


Keeping the Sabbath 

QUESTION: What is your conception of the words 
in the Ten Commandments which read , u Remember 
the Sabbath Day to keep it holy?" How should we 
spend the Sabbath Day? 

ANSWER: The answer to that question is partly along 
the line of definite fact and partly along the line of personal 



82 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


opinion. You may take my facts as absolute. You must take 
my opinion for what it is worth. 

Here are the facts: That the word Sabbath does not mean 
seventh, as so many suppose. It has nothing to do with the 
idea of “seventh” at all. I say that because persons are al¬ 
ways writing me to ask whether we ought not to keep Satur¬ 
day instead of Sunday as our Sabbath. The word Sabbath is 
older than the Hebrew nation or language and means cessation 
or rest. 

The second statement that is a statement of fact and not of 
opinion is that in the Old Testament, the word “holy” means 
separate, chiefly. It does not mean pious but different, sep¬ 
arate. So, what Moses said to the people was, Keep your day 
of cessation separate. Keep it distinct. Keep it different. It 
may be the seventh day or the first day. The characteristic 
thing about it, however, is that it must be a day of rest, of 
cessation. And it must be kept regularly and distinctly. 

Now, quite early in the life of the Christian Church, the fol¬ 
lowers of Jesus began to keep the day of the week on which 
he rose from the dead as his day and their Sabbath: their 
day that was different. Pliny, the Roman Governor of Bi- 
thynia, wrote the Emperor Trajan a report of the life of his 
province and in it he describes the life of the Christians in 
the province. He says that they keep this day beginning it 
with a simple meal which they call the Agape, that is, the Love- 
feast and finish it with another meal, doubtless the Lord’s 
Supper. So that, apart from the references in Scripture to 
the Lord’s day, there is very good secular historical evi¬ 
dence of the age-long custom of the Christian Church. 

Those are the matters of fact. Don’t listen to folk who 
tell you that we must keep Saturday or be damned. Noth¬ 
ing is so insulting to our thought of God or to the facts of 
astronomy. Saturday this year is not the same day of the 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


83 


week it was five hundred years ago and certainly not the 
same day of the week it was two thousand years ago. 

It is the spirit of the thing, the willingness to recognize the 
command of God, which happens also to be the law of nature, 
that one day in seven is necessary for rest to a man or woman 
who wants to be normal and healthy. 


Broadcasting and Community 
Worship 

QUESTION: Why should a person attend church 
when he can listen to the services and hear them 
distinctly while sitting comfortably in his own chair 
in his own room? 

ANSWER: That is a direct shot and I get it. But I’m 
not so sure that you are going to sit quite so comfortably in 
your chair after this, not if I can succeed in shooting at you 
as straight as you are shooting at me. All right. Here goes. 

I think a man who will sit in his chair comfortably suck¬ 
ing in the Gospel like a sponge, is the most selfish being 
unhung, if he can get up and walk. The value of community 
worship is not just subjective. The whole congregation gains 
by the impulse of your presence, your prayer, your praise. 
If you don’t believe that, think what it would feel like to 
be the only spectator at a theater or the only member of the 
audience at a concert. 

What a wretched man you would be if yours were the only 
laugh and if yours were the only hands applauding. More 
than half the joy is in being part of a great company, all 
under the sway of the same emotion. It is like that with 
community worship. You make your contribution to the 
well-being of your worshiping brother, if you also are at- 



84 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


tuned to his emotion, his yearning, his prayer. Shame on the 
man who denies the brother who is, perhaps, fighting a harder 
battle than himself, the sustenance and assistance of his 
presence. 

God never blesses the soul of a man who is guilty of any 
form of selfishness. And staying at home to enjoy what 
God meant to be a great communal act is the most selfish 
act of all; disastrous to the spiritual life of the man who so 
gorges himself. 


What Hospitals Owe to Christ 

QUESTION: We are installing the radio and ear- 
phones for every patient in our Hospital and hope 
to have everything ready for your sermon and question 
box next Sunday . I have wondered whether you 
would like to speak a kind of dedicatory word over the 
air at your services Sunday so that we and our pa¬ 
tients may hear you. 

ANSWER: Now, I do that very gladly and feel very 
honored to be allowed to do that. I know quite a lot about 
hospitals. Once I was a chaplain to a hospital. Then, in 
the last three years, I have spent three separate months in 
hospitals as a patient. 

Well, here is my word. A hospital might be supposed, by 
those who do not know much about it, to be a rather depress¬ 
ing place because of the suffering there. But, as a matter 
of fact, a real hospital is about the most hopeful place this 
world contains. Most really sick folk outside of a hospital 
are steadily getting worse until they enter it. As soon as 
they do enter it, especially if they enter it soon enough, their 
faces are turned toward health and healing once more. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


85 


But there is a bigger reason. It lies in the fact that there 
was not a hospital in the whole world, until Jesus came. The 
inspiration to really care for the sick came directly from him. 
I believe that if we go back far enough in our thinking, we 
shall find that the skill of every doctor and the consecrated 
patience of every nurse owes its origin and has its source 
in him. 

But there is something else. Christ is truly by our beds of 
pain and we can touch the healing of his seamless dress. 
In a Christian hospital, we can especially do that, because 
there is so much in such a hospital to lead our thoughts to 
him. He is the Great Physician today, as always, and I 
hope the patients, the office staff, the nurses and the doctors 
will always feel that there are going to be great and increas¬ 
ingly potent ministries of healing in the very atmosphere of 
your splendid hospital. 

I have a word especially for the doctors. I happen to 
know that doctors are sometimes weary men. All right, here 
is something to cheer them up and set them thinking. Dr. 
Henry Ward Beecher was once asked to preach a kind of 
official sermon to the members of the American Medical As¬ 
sociation. His friends were very anxious that he should ap¬ 
preciate the significance of the occasion and choose the right 
text. So they tried to find out what his text would be but the 
great preacher declined to confide in them before the event. 
“Oh,” said he, “I think the text, at any rate, will be all 
right.” This was his text. Judge for yourselves whether it 
was all right. It is in the first book of Chronicles, the six¬ 
teenth chapter and the twelfth verse. “And in the 39th year 
of the reign of Asa, he was diseased in his feet; his disease 
was exceeding great; yet, in his disease, he sought not to the 
Lord but to the physicians—and—and Asa slept with his 
fathers.” 



86 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


Should Coal Be Nationalized? 

QUESTION: Don't you think that coal mining 
ought to he made one of the national monopolies , 
coal to he exploited only by the nation as a whole , not 
for private profit? 

ANSWER: I have always been an advocate—when 
asked for my opinion—of the national possession of all 
natural monopolies. My opinion on that and all other 
economic subjects is worth no more than anybody else’s and, 
therefore, I only give it when asked for. But here it is: 

Mining coal is a national need. Everybody wants coal 
for some purpose or another. It isn’t any individual’s or 
corporation’s creation, but the result of age-long natural 
forces. Everybody profits by cheap, easily accessible coal. 
Moreover, the scramble for sales and for profits makes the 
getting of coal excessive, by the time the raw material reaches 
the consumer. The lost labor owing to frequent strikes is un¬ 
economic and therefore costly to the consumer, which is every¬ 
body in the nation. Cheap coal would be of such general 
benefit, would so quicken industry, would so multiply the 
number of consumers of everything that depends on cheap 
coal—which is almost everything whatsoever—that we should 
all get the benefit in the tremendous increase of the taxable 
wealth of the nation. 

I suppose that is Socialism; but, then, in the days when 
the mails were run for individual profit, those who advocated 
that the Government should run the mails, were called Social¬ 
ists. Now, everybody sees the value of the mails being a 
Federal monopoly. Some day, everybody will see the neces¬ 
sity of all such national needs being taken care of as na¬ 
tional monopolies. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


87 


Is Genesis 1, History? 

QUESTION: Do you think the first chapter of 
Genesis is literal history? Why did God inspire it, 
if it is not true? 

ANSWER: I do not believe that the first chapter of 
Genesis is literal history. If I believed that, I could not be¬ 
lieve that the story embedded in the rocks which is also part 
of the Universal Word of God, is literal history. 

Yet, the first chapter is true; just as some of the stories 
my mother told me at her knee were not literal history but 
yet were true. They were true because they contained les¬ 
sons of obedience and love and truth, which things are always 
true. But when she told me those stories, she just had to 
accommodate herself to my thought-forms. What would 
have been the use, in my third year, of explaining to me the 
scientific process of human generation? She told me that 
babies came from God, that I, HER baby, came from God, 
especially. Was that not true? 

Just so with the first chapter of Genesis. The folk to whom 
it was written were, in many senses, children. Was God to 
wait until they were intellectually grown up before he talked 
with them at all? So he talked with them, being a very lov¬ 
ing Father, in the language they used and understood. But 
what he taught them there was true, eternally true. For he 
taught them that God was a lover of order, first of all; then, 
a lover of light; then, a lover of fruitfulness; then, a lover of 
all living things and, at last, a lover of man whom he loved 
so much that he delighted to talk with him. 

It’s a long while since those words were written but I 
sometimes wonder whether we have learned all they have 
to teach us about God, even yet. If we had, we shouldn’t 
squabble so much amongst ourselves about them. 



88 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


Did Christ Teach a Gospel of Hate? 

QUESTION: Do you think that the Gospel of hate 
which Jesus taught in the 14 th chapter of Luke and 
his teaching to forsake kindred had the tendency to 
unsettle the very foundations of society? I have 
never had this subject explained in a satisfactory 
way. 

ANSWER: I do not know that I shall be able to ex¬ 
plain it satisfactorily either but I will at least try. First of 
all, I cannot understand how that chapter could suggest that 
the Christian should forsake the world in order to avoid evil 
and Hell. Christ talks in the first part of the chapter about 
drawing the fallen ox or sheep out of the well and in the 13th 
verse about interesting ourselves in the lame and halt and 
blind, the poor and the maimed, if we would be blessed. I 
don’t see how we can do that by withdrawing from the world. 
Most of our mistakes of that kind are due to the reading of 
parts of the teaching of Jesus to the exclusion of the whole. 
I admit that it is done, however. 

The word “hate” comes in the latter part of the chapter, 
where the whole theme of Jesus is that we must count the 
cost before we start to follow him. He talks about the man 
who started to build a tower without money enough to finish, 
and about the king who went to war with too few men. 
Then, he says, “If a man cometh after me and hatetb not his 
own father and mother and wife and children and brethren 
and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my dis¬ 
ciple—so also, whosoever he be of you that renounceth not 
all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.” 

I think it is very important to notice that the first verses 
of the 15th chapter say that then, right then, after those 
tremendous conditions had just been imposed, “then drew #ear 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


89 


unto him all the publicans and sinners for to hear him.” And 
then, immediately following that, he told his incomparable 
stories of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son. There 
is a terrible sternness in Jesus which we have forgotten some¬ 
what lately but there is a tremendous compensating love. 

There is no getting round that word “hate.” It means 
“hate” in the Greek and is translated “hate” even in the most 
modern translations, like Moffatt and Weymouth. But I do 
not think that Jesus had in mind the terrible, aggressive 
kind of hate that we picture through this word. He meant, 
surely, that we were to put everything—even family, even 
life, second to him and the things he stood for. 

I do think that folk who make this verse an excuse for 
literally indulging in an orgy of hate against their families 
or who make it an excuse for deserting their families would, 
if they were numerous, damage the foundations of Society. 
They are wrong in thinking it teaches monasticism. It simply 
means that we must, at all costs, put Christ first. Not many 
folk have really done it. But those who have, have not de¬ 
stroyed Society. Rather, they have reconstructed it in finer 
ways. St. Francis of Assisi comes to my mind as an instance. 
He simply had to turn his back on that misunderstanding 
father of his and leave his home. But the effect was that he 
did more for human progress, by taking Christ at his word and 
literally following him, than a regiment of half-hearted 
Christians. 

Most of us don’t have to make this choice but I am sure 
that what Jesus means is that if the choice between home and 
himself comes, home has to go. But that does not mean a 
hermitage. That is the most selfish and therefore un-Christ- 
like form of existence; to abandon Society when it needs the 
people of Christ so much. No, I don’t think Christ is likely 
to undermine the foundations of Society, except the rotten 
ones—and they need it. 



90 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


What Accepting Christ Means 

QUESTION: Do you believe that all those who have 
failed to accept Christ as their divine leader will be 
eternally damned , even though they have lived lives 
of high moral standard? John's Gospel , chapter III 
and verse 18 and Mark , chapter XVI and verse 16 
says they will . 

ANSWER: I refuse to go any further than the New 
Testament in my thinking concerning the future of those who 
reject Christ. That is, of course, the only sound position. 
Anything else is sheer dogmatism of a very dreadful sort. 
The 18th verse of the third chapter of John need not be read 
as referring to eternal punishment as such. This is how it 
reads—for the benefit of those who have not yet read it— 
“He that believeth not hath been condemned already be¬ 
cause he hath not believed on the name of the only begotten 
Son of God.” The next verse explains it. “This is the condem¬ 
nation, that light is come into the world and men loved the 
darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil.” 

It all depends on what you mean by rejecting Christ. The 
verse seems to mean that a man will be tested by what I 
may call the gravitation of his life. If that tendency is to 
reach out and seek after the light—any light—then he will 
ultimately come to the great light, Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

The man who deliberately turns his back to the light, any 
light, and walks the other way, surely deserves the dark¬ 
ness. But I should read those verses to mean that any time 
he turns the direction of his life to light, which is what you 
call a life of high moral standard, the condemnation no longer 
applies to him. 

About Mark, chapter XVI, and verse 16, it may interest you 
to know that the Gospel of Mark ends at the ninth verse in 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


9 i 


the oldest manuscripts. Verse 16 is not included. I think 
you will find that, apart from this verse, which is not in the 
most ancient copies of the Gospels, the emphasis is placed 
rather upon doing than upon mere affirmation of belief. No¬ 
body, surely, imagines that Christ will be content, at the 
Judgment, with a mere affirmation. When men or women 
enter these United States, they have to affirm that they are 
neither polygamists nor anarchists. But I fancy that the gov¬ 
ernment takes a closer review of the lives of suspected persons 
than that. So, I suppose it will be with Jesus. Paul says we 
shall be judged for the deeds done in the body and James 
says in that startling way of his, “Ye believe in God. Thou 
doest well. The devils also believe and tremble.” 

The passage my friend quotes from St. Matthew, chapter 
XXV, the 31st verse, distinctly emphasizes that it is the kind 
of life we have lived rather than the belief we have pro¬ 
fessed that will win us eternal life. Listen to the surprised 
answer of the righteous and you will find they are surprised 
that they had met Jesus at all. “Then shall they say, Lord 
when saw we thee hungered, or athirst, or a stranger, or 
naked, or sick, or in prison, and visited thee? And he shall 
say, Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these ... ye 
did it unto me.” 

That seems to mean that we accept Christ whenever we 
accept the doing of a Christ-like thing. One thing I am 
surer of every day; it won’t be church members only who 
will be saved. 

“The ways of God are broader, 

Than the measure of man’s mind, 

And the heart of the eternal 
Is most wonderfully kind.” 

But the kindest heart in all the world cannot make a man 
who refuses light use his eyes or live in the light if he de¬ 
liberately and constantly chooses the dark. 



92 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


Perishing Pagans 

QUESTION: If all are to be saved through Christ 
Jesus, how are those to be saved, who, both before his 
advent and after, in pagan countries, never even heard 
his name? 

ANSWER: My friend, who has read deeply in the Scrip¬ 
tures, has not read deeply enough. The responsibility for 
the heathen hearing about Christ is not theirs but ours. 

Further let me say that the people who are referred to by 
Paul as being without God and without hope in the world are 
the people who deliberately turned themselves to bestiality, 
not the people who happened to be born in lands where the 
name of Christ is not yet preached. Personally, I should re¬ 
fuse to believe in a Christ who condemned folk to damnation 
just because they did not have the same loving parents that 
I had or who were not blessed with my blond complexion. 
Nothing seems to me so un-Christian as that dreadful kind 
of teaching. I do not mean that that is the teaching you 
hold to, but I am shocked to find so many still holding it. 


Is State Killing, Murder? 

QUESTION: How far should we carry our applica¬ 
tion of the Commandment, u Thou shall not kill?" 
Does this apply to state killings? 

ANSWER: I suppose this is another reaction from the 
Sacco-Vanzetti execution. We should carry the application 
of any commandment, either of God or man, just as far as 
it can be legitimately carried. The Ten Commandments, for 
instance, were at least foreshadowed in a Babylonian docu- 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


93 


ment called the Code of Hammurabi which has practically 
the same group of Commandments. 

But that Code also carries with it some instances of how 
the commandments are to be interpreted. It says, for in¬ 
stance, that if a badly built house falls on its owner and 
kills him, the builder of the house shall be condemned to 
death. That seems sound and it should be applied with prof¬ 
it to the makers of insecure ships, buildings, poison liquor 
and everything that destroys or makes unsafe human life in 
any way. The same is true of the other commandments. 
Jesus said that a man who was angry with his brother was 
guilty of murder and that one who looked lustfully was guilty 
of adultery. 

I am quite sure that Moses did not understand that the 
commandment against murder applied to state executions, 
because he provided for state executions. Whether the gen¬ 
eral application of the commandment will ever include state 
execution I do not know. There is not a word in the Bible, 
so far as I can see, against the right of the state to take a 
life that has taken other life. 

Did the Apostles Believe in 
Reincarnation? 

QUESTION: Does not the story of Christ and his 
disciples at Caesarea Philippi , when they said that 
he was John the Baptist or Elijah or one of the 
prophets , indicate that they were believers in rein¬ 
carnation? What , in your opinion , is the value of 
reincarnation? 

ANSWER: Yes, I think it does up to that point. I 
mean that up to that point, they were probably believers in 




94 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


reincarnation. But I’m quite sure they lost all that in the 
fuller revelation that came to them after the Resurrection. 

I don’t see the slightest use in any philosophy that has 
no practical results. What is the use of having been re¬ 
incarnated, so that this life we are now living is only the sec¬ 
ond or the hundredth of a series, unless we are sure of that? 
I remember nothing of my previous existences, if I had any. 
What is the use of them to me, then? 

There used to be an idea that our feeling that we had 
passed through some experience before or had been in some 
unfamiliar spot with which yet, somehow, we seemed sud¬ 
denly familiar—there used to be an idea that this was a 
kind of re-vivified memory of another, earlier existence. But 
they have pretty well proved that this is not so but due to 
the two lobes of the brain picking up the impression of these 
new surroundings at fractionally different times. So there’s 
nothing to that. 

The personal history of most of the Theosophists—Mr. 
Leadbetter is only one instance—makes me very suspicious of 
their reincarnational theories. The tree and its fruits are 
still intimately connected and the life history of some of the 
proponents of this idea is about as rotten as it can be, from 
Madame Blavatsky down—or up. 

A Cure for Church Gossip 

QUESTION: In the first epistle of John , the fifth 
chapter and the 16 th verse , there is a strange passage 
about prayer and sin which I find it hard to under¬ 
stand. Will you kindly explain it? 

ANSWER: Gladly, if I can. Here is the verse in Dr. 
Moffatt’s translation: “If any man see his brother commit¬ 
ting a sin that is not deadly, he shall ask and obtain life 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


95 


for him—for anyone who does not commit a deadly sin. 
There is such a thing as a deadly sin; I do not mean that he 
is to pray for that. All iniquity is sin, but there are sins 
which are not deadly.” 

Now, if I were preaching a sermon about that verse, I 
think I should begin, as usual, on the ground floor. I think 
I should point out that whatever else the writer meant, 
whatever difficult things he meant, he did mean that the 
best thing to do with sin in the church is to pray about it 
rather than gossip about it. There is no doubt at all about 
that. It is a very vital part of the Apostle’s teaching which 
we have not tried very hard to learn. 

Listen to another passage. It is the well-known verse in 
I John, chapter II, verse 2: “If any man sin, we have an ad¬ 
vocate with the Father”—not “he has an advocate” but, “we 
have an advocate”—all of us, praying for him. So; if any 
man see his brother committing a sin which is not deadly, 
he shall ask and obtain life for him. When we learn to 
pray for each other, we shall have learned half the teaching 
of Jesus. 

But there is that curious phrase “He shall ask and obtain 
life for him.” Remember that in the Gospel which this same 
man wrote, he said, in the first chapter, speaking about 
Christ, “In him was life” and throughout this letter, he ex¬ 
presses the idea frequently that sin is due to the same causes 
in the soul that disease is in the body. We are surrounded 
by it all the time. The germs of it are within us all the time. 

The difference between a sick man and a well man is not 
that one has germs of tuberculosis within him and the other 
has not. We all have those germs. The difference between 
the sick man and the well man is that the health of the man, 
his abundant life, keeps them under, while the life in the sick 
man is too frail, the life stream too sluggish, to do that, 
and they obtain the mastery. So, says John, having that 



96 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


view of sin, we are to pray for that spiritually sick man that 
he may have new accessions of life, of spiritual life, in order 
to throw it off, so to speak, like a cold. 

That is, says the Apostle, if it is not a deadly sin. What 
does he mean by “a deadly sin”? I don’t know. The Fath¬ 
ers said there were seven deadly sins: lust, adultery, murder, 
and so on. I don’t believe that they are any more deadly 
than some other sins like slander, for instance. Jesus him¬ 
self taught that there was one sin that was deadly, the un¬ 
forgivable sin against the Holy Spirit. It was the sin of 
imputing spiritual results to demoniacal powers. That, as you 
see, is a slander against the very fountain of goodness and is, 
in its very nature, unpardonable because it destroys the very 
realization of Goodness, attributing it to the devil. I think 
that is what John means here by the deadly sin. If a man 
attributed the greatest character the world has seen to dem¬ 
ons, he is simply out of court, as a little thinking will 
show you. 

But you have struck a passage which has bothered the in¬ 
terpreters all through the centuries. Don’t worry about it, 
except the slander part. 


Sin and the After-Life 

QUESTION: What does John mean in the Is/ 
epistle of John , chapter III and verse 9 when he 
says, u Whosoever is begotten of God doeth no sin , 
because his seed abideth in him: and he cannot sin , 
because he is begotten of God.” 

ANSWER: John seems to take two lines in his epistle 
about sin. In the first chapter, he says that “if we say we 
have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


97 


If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us 
our sins.” In the second chapter and the first verse, he uses 
the expression, “If any man sin.” Obviously, there is an ap¬ 
parent contradiction. I think it is only apparent, however, 
that John is thinking of sins of deliberation, willful sins and 
also of sins of error. There are both kinds even in our own 
families. Children commit sins of error when they put pep¬ 
per into pies. They know that pies need flavoring but they 
get the wrong kind of flavoring. But they also commit sins 
of willful and deliberate disobedience and of flagrant antag¬ 
onism as young Teddy Roosevelt did when he kneeled down 
at his Southern mother’s knee and asked God to bless the 
Northern armies because she had corrected him. 

In other words, and choosing another kind of illustration, it 
is always possible for a man to sin against the woman he has 
sworn to cherish, but it is unthinkable, if he loves her. He 
may do things she would not favor, but he will never flagrantly 
fly in the face of honor or chastity. 

That is the sort of thing John, in the verse you mention, 
means is impossible. It is unthinkable that a man or woman 
who is in love with Christ will deliberately outrage his honor 
or willfully sully the flag of his cross. But he or she may, 
nevertheless, do things that the larger wisdom of Christ 
does not approve. That kind of sin can be confessed. 


Who Goes to Hell? 

QUESTION: Would you mind discussing the 

seeming contradictions in the Bible regarding uni¬ 
versal salvation? 

ANSWER: I do not believe in the literal inspiration of 
every syllable of the Scriptures but believe in a growing revela¬ 
tion of the purposes of God, made complete in Jesus Christ. 



98 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


If any other Biblical writer contradicts him, I assume that the 
writer, like some of the rest of us, has not entirely assimilated 
the teaching of Jesus. 

That teaching—of Jesus—is clear and unmistakable. I 
know of nothing in the teaching of Christ that says anything 
about universal salvation. I do not find any statement any¬ 
where that the folk we call sinners are going to be eternally 
shut out from his kingdom. 

I do find many places, including that place in Matthew to 
which your letter refers where we folk who profess much 
are in constant danger through hypocrisies and intolerances. 
We are all wrong in our thought that the dirty, unwashed 
folk are going to Hell. It is the clean and washed folk— 
clean outside—who look good without being loving and 
kindly who are in danger of losing eternal life. 


That Gift of Tongues 

QUESTION: What does I John chapter IV mean 
when it exhorts us to try the Spirits? 

ANSWER: I know the anxiety that lies behind that 
inquiry because of the private letter that accompanies it. 
I am therefore going to take a little more time than usual in 
answering it. 

Right from the very beginning the Christian Church has 
simply been cursed by organizations or persons who claim 
that they were filled with the Spirit of God, using that claim 
to make money, or to win for themselves notoriety. There 
was a man named Simon Magus in the Book of Acts who 
wanted to buy the gift from Paul that he might use it for 
money. 

One of the gifts of the Spirit that was most coveted was 
the gift of tongues. It would seem that this was the one gift 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


99 


of the Spirit that was most prostituted. At first it seems to 
have been the ability to speak other languages than one’s own, 
or, at any rate, the ability to be understood by people of dif¬ 
ferent speech than one’s own. 

Later, it seems to have degenerated into a kind of jargon 
that nobody could understand except the folk who claimed 
they were initiated. Things became so serious in the Corinth¬ 
ian Church, for instance, that Paul wrote five of the sixteen 
chapters of his first epistle against those who had generated 
a false pride because they claimed they had this gift. He says 
some very strong things against those who profess the gift. 

In his list of the gifts of the Spirit, in the 12 th chapter, he 
puts the gift of tongues last, deeming it of small account. That 
wonderful 13 th chapter about love is really a protest against 
regarding the gift of tongues, among other gifts of the Spirit, 
as superior to the supreme gift of love. “Though I speak with 
the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am 
become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal,” is the kind of 
thing he says about it. In the 14th chapter, he comes out 
much stronger against this dangerous and much abused gift. 

By this time, those who had the gift of tongues, as they pro¬ 
fessed, had become just babblers as they are today, and he 
says to them in the 9th verse, “So also ye, unless ye utter by 
the speech easy to be understood, how shall it be known what 
is spoken? For ye speak into the air.” In the 19th verse he 
says, “I thank God, I speak with tongues more than ye all; 
howbeit, in the church I would rather speak five words that 
can be understood, than ten thousand words in a tongue. In 
the 23rd verse, coming out more strongly still he says, “Will 
they not say that ye are mad?” 

Now as I understand it, by the time of John’s epistle, there 
were those who were standing up in the churches and opposing 
the common sense of the church on the pretence that they had 
this special gift and a special revelation from God for their 



IOO 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


own benefit. That is why John exhorts the Church to try the 
Spirits. The way to try them is to take the common sense of 
the Church, by which I mean the opinion that is common to 
the Church. The Spirit of God is the spirit of sanity. Eccen¬ 
tricities are an abomination to it. There is one sure way of 
trying any spirit. If it means some comfortable pickings for 
somebody or some group, it is not of the Spirit of God. The 
gift of tongues became one of the withdrawn gifts of the Spirit 
because of the way in which it was prostituted and my own 
experience of those who have claimed it in these days is that 
they were either epileptic or that they were charlatans, or 
frauds. 

The necessity for trying the Spirits was never greater than 
today. Lives are being ruined and crooks are being fattened 
by folk who refuse to take reasonable delay before they do 
what somebody tells them God has inspired them to do. I have 
known minds to be shipwrecked and fortunes dissipated 
that way. You may be quite sure of this, if God reveals him¬ 
self to one as desiring him to do something out of the com¬ 
mon, God will also impress that same thought on the mind of 
some other sane person. He revealed himself to Saul on the 
way to Damascus but he also revealed himself to a man in the 
city. He revealed himself to Cornelius but he revealed him¬ 
self to Peter. He always gives us an opportunity to check up 
on these alleged revelations. 


An Experience From My Boyhood 

QUESTION: Do you think it is possible for any¬ 
body to answer questions about God to somebody 
else's satisfaction? Did you ever have anybody 
interpret any spiritual question for you in a way 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


IOI 


that gave you entire satisfaction and put you at ease? 
I am really sincere in asking these questions. 

ANSWER: I don’t need my brother’s assurance that he 
is perfectly sincere. The questions are quite right and very 
sensible. Of course, I do think we can help each other by com¬ 
paring notes about our spiritual difficulties, else I should not 
be spending my time in preparation for this hour. You know 
that I try my hardest not to be dogmatic or too positive, 
except about the really fundamental things. But I do think 
we gain enormously by thinking these things out man to man 
with charity and sweetness of spirit. 

I owe my soul to a man who dealt with me that way when 
I was about eighteen. He was a very clever man and a very 
human man, even though he was a pastor. I went to him in 
some trouble. I had been reading, as I always have all through 
my life, a great deal of science. It happened that I had been 
reading, just then, a book about the existence of the soul. 
The writer of the book had said that the idea that men had 
souls came from the gluttony of primitive man. 

He said that primitive man was a hunter, which may be 
true. He went on to say that after a hunt, primitive man sat 
down to a meal too large for him and the consequence was 
that when he went to sleep, he had nightmare and dreamed 
that he was away hunting again. When he woke, he felt that 
he really had been away from the place where he fell asleep. 
But his fellow hunters assured him that his body had not 
moved. His explanation was that there must be two of him— 
the part that had lain sleeping and the part that had been 
away hunting in the night—soul and body. Well, that was so 
clever that it troubled me and I went to the clever man who 
happened to be my pastor at that time. 

He listened to me and then went on smoking and talking 
about other things. I thought he had ignored my troubled 



102 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


question. But presently he said, “Well, I’m going to walk 
home with you, Copeland.” It was a fine night of full moon. 
Presently, he said, as we walked together, “Copeland, I haven’t 
answered your question—not because I could not, but because 
I know that, with your kind of mind, there will be many more 
disturbing questions for you before you are through. Here is 
the big question. What do you think about Jesus Christ? Do 
you think him worth making your example? Supposing he is a 
myth—is it worth living as if he were real?” 

I remember that I said I thought it was worth while. Then, 
said he, do that. I’ve tried to do that ever since and I’ve come 
to know, in my very bones, that he is real. Many questions 
have troubled me since then. I have them now. Faith is always 
a fight to a thinking man, but that is my answer to you. That 
pastor saved me from the folly and despair of an agnosticism 
that would never have brought me any satisfaction or have 
enabled me to find steam for the engine of my energy. And 
ever since then, I’ve wanted to do that same kind of thing for 
other folk, the kind of thing that man did for me. That’s how 
this Question Box came into existence. I hope that, eventually, 
it will help you and thousands more. 

Hang Theology? 

QUESTION: Since all theological attempts to ex¬ 
plain God are human and therefore faulty , would 
it not he best to give up attempts to he theological and 
just read the story , accepting it for what it is? 

ANSWER: I quite agree that all theological attempts 
are human. Being human, they are feeble, fragmentary, 
faulty. But that is not a reason for despising them. It is 
when we are wrestling with something too big to entirely cap¬ 
ture, that we are most akin to the divine. It is when we are 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


103 


attempting to climb the heights that are inaccessible that our 
heads are nearest to the stars. And humanity is so constructed 
that the more impossible a task is, especially a task of thought, 
the more determined humanity is to achieve. 

We ought to ask ourselves why that is so, and why, if that 
be so, the desire to achieve the impossible has been implanted 
in us. It looks as though the Divine, who created us, had it in 
mind to enable us to reach the inaccessible at last—given time 
enough; or eternity enough. 

Moreover, the most absurd and imperfect theological attempt 
to describe the Divine does give us some hint, some glimpse, 
if the attempt is made honestly. Take photography; it is 
a human art. Being human, it, also, is imperfect. It must be 
because it is an attempt to print on a flat surface what, after 
all, is a thing of contours and protuberances. Photography gets 
the effect of protuberance by light and shade. Often, the light 
is too glaring and the shadow too deep. But there was never 
a photograph that did not tell us something about the thing 
or person it attempted to portray. So it is with the attempt 
of theology to portray the Divine to human minds. 


Do We Make God in Our Image? 

QUESTION: Do you not think that the God of 
Moses was simply Moses * conception of God and 
nothing more? 

ANSWER: The questioner suggests that we all create 
God in our own image. Moses, being a very aggressive type 
of person, trying to create a nation out of a rabble of slaves, 
was emphasizing law and was somewhat ruthless in his appli¬ 
cation of it. The God he conjured up in his own mind was 
naturally so like himself as to be himself. That is the argu- 



104 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


ment. It’s a good argument but, like most of our arguments, 
it has holes in it. Here is one. If Moses’ God was Moses’ 
creation, how came it that Moses’ God reproved Moses, even 
to the extent of forbidding him entrance into Canaan? 


Behaviorism and Mind 

QUESTION: How does the Behavioristic psychology 
treat the problem of the fundamental nature of mind? 

ANSWER: Behaviorism seems to me to treat mind in a 
purely physical way. For instance, it treats mind itself as 
consisting of the whole nervous system of man, including the 
brain and even the larynx, but nothing else; nothing beyond 
that material and manifest thinking and feeling machinery. 
For instance again, it professes to read the secrets of the 
mental processes from the movements of the larynx, which 
seem to involuntarily accompany brain processes. 

I should say from what I know of Behaviorism that it is 
entirely materialistic, like most of our other philosophies now¬ 
adays, attributing all our impulses to physical bases and in¬ 
spirations—if I may use that phrase—and attributing our 
ideals to the secretions of our ductless glands and things of 
that kind. 

While I am convinced that we have not credited the bodily 
functions, including those of sex, with all the influence they 
undoubtedly deserve in the matter of emotion and ideality, it 
is simply anti-Christian to say that mind is a reaction of bodily 
processes against other physical conditions. 

The Christian view that the mind is the circumferential 
part of the soul, which, again, is the circumferential part of 
the Universal Spirit—that mind working through but not abso¬ 
lutely identified with physical processes—seems to be a much 
more practical theory than any other. 




TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


105 


Kill Which Babies? 

QUESTION: What do you think of the proposal by 
Clarence Darrow to kill off all defective babies to 
improve the race? 

ANSWER: Well, the joker in the pack is that there are 
only a very tiny fraction of defective babies; I mean, of 
course, of babies actually deformed before birth; not deformed 
in the act of birth. As for moral defects at birth it is practi¬ 
cally impossible to detect these, even if there are any, which 
really modern biologists doubt. 

That Jukes-Edwards theory that heredity has very much 
to do with the kind of men and women we are is pretty well 
exploded. You know the theory, that if you happen to be a 
descendant of Jonathan Edwards you cannot easily avoid 
becoming a president of these United States or, at least, the 
wife of the president; while, if you happen to be the descend¬ 
ant of somebody named Jukes, you are pretty sure to be hanged. 

The most modern science, in spite of Mr. Wiggam, who did 
so much to make that theory well-known, says that that kind 
of teaching, besides being the most hopeless possible, is scien¬ 
tifically just nonsense and not to be relied upon at all. Indeed, 
the most modern biologists of all state that all we inherit is 
the possibility of something, not even a tendency towards it. 
That is a fine and really Christian discovery of biological 
science and ought to be known to everybody who was cursed 
by a drunken father or mother; or by an ancestry that was in 
any way deformed or defective. What we have to be scared of 
is very early environment, sometimes, the very earliest environ¬ 
ment of all. For instance, they used to say that children were 
born syphilitic. That seems to be no longer true but gloriously 
untrue. But the baby can be infected from the mother in the 
very act of being born. So, morally, there is no age too young 




io6 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


for environment to affect the child. Bad habits start being 
formed long before babies leave the cradle. 

But, so far as being born is concerned, what the world 
ought to know is that God loves it so much that so far as in 
him lay, he took good care that every new-born baby was 
really an entirely new opportunity for this old world to begin 
entirely anew. Science and the Gospel meet each other there. 


How Will Christ Come? 

QUESTION: What will take place when Christ 
returns to earth again? Is the Church—or the 
Christian people—the hride of Christ to reign with 
him , and , if so , who are they to reign over? 

ANSWER: There is one thing that I want to point out 
about the Second Coming of Christ, as it is called. The Scrip¬ 
tures nowhere call it a second coming. That expression was 
apparently never used until much later than the writing of 
the New Testament. The New Testament always calls it “The 
Appearing.” The Greek word used always means a “Revela¬ 
tion,” a “Manifestation.” You will always find in the margin 
of the Standard Version or any modern version that word “ap¬ 
pearing.” It is very important because it corroborates the 
statement of Jesus that he would be with us always. The 
difference at the end will be that then he will be visibly 
present as now he is invisibly present. 

The teaching of Scripture about the Advent of Jesus is con¬ 
fusing. For instance, while Revelation speaks about the Mil¬ 
lennium, or the thousand years of peace before the final advent 
of Jesus Christ, no other book in the New Testament speaks 
of this. Practically every New Testament book does speak 
quite conclusively of that advent—as distinctly from the Mil¬ 
lennium that precedes it. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


107 


I think that the first verse of the second chapter of Hebrews 
best answers your question. “We see not yet all things put 
under the feet of man,” says the writer, “but we see Jesus 
crowned with glory and honor.” The final reign can be under¬ 
stood as the reign of the Lord and his Church over the whole 
of the universe: a reign undisputed and complete. That is, 
a reign without the opposition of evil, either in our own lives, 
in nature, or in the policies of man. 

The bride is the Church—the whole Church—without any 
more divisions or controversies. That means the whole body 
of Christian believers everywhere in every age and every land, 
of every color and every speech—all who call upon the name 
of the Lord Jesus. That again means those who shape their 
lives by him and walk in his commandments. There is no 
justification anywhere in the New Testament for narrowing 
that to any sect or denomination. The bride is the whole 
composite body of Christian believers of every kind. 


The Big Thing About Lindbergh 

QUESTION: What do you regard as the big thing 
about Captain Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic? 

ANSWER: There are many big things about it. One of 
them is the youth of the boy who did it. We think of twenty- 
four as a careless—or, at any rate, a carefree age. And we are 
apt to think of Capt. Lindbergh’s flight as one of those happy- 
go-lucky things that happened to come off successfully. 

As the story is unfolded, we are coming to see that it was 
nothing of the kind. It was the result of years of thought on 
the part of this silent youth; of careful calculation of stresses 
and strains and of capacities calculated to a nicety; of studies 
of drift and the unreliability of compasses and things of that 
kind. It was a distinct case of an old head on young shoulders 



io8 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


combined with a sublime courage and a daring that was by no 
means so reckless as we are apt to think the courage of twenty- 
four generally is. 

Then, of course, this boy has the modesty of youth, the un¬ 
tarnished bloom of his strength still preserved. I wish I could 
make the youth of this generation hear me when I say that 
the significant thing about this boy is that he is pure, seem¬ 
ingly both in body, which is easy, and in mind, which is more 
difficult. President Coolidge picked that out as very worthy 
of comment. He called it “his unspoiled youth.” Unspoiled 
youth is unsoiled youth. There is not a stain upon it. He did 
not drink, even in Paris. He has all the unrivalled beauty of 
a clean body. His modesty is a thing to marvel at in modern 
America and a thing to praise God for. 

But I myself think that the crowning marvel is his un¬ 
willingness to be bought. That is the temptation which twenty- 
four finds it hardest to resist. Yet millions have been placed 
at this youth’s feet if he will only commercialize his ideal. He 
has, so far, refused them all. That is a tremendous thing, for 
the youth of America, as an object lesson of where true great¬ 
ness lies. Here is one who has an ideal and who has determined 
to steadily pursue it, unswerved and unmoved by any con¬ 
sideration that would dim that ideal. 

It is an ideal that is intended to benefit the whole nation 
and the whole wide world. That is the big thing. We ought to 
thank God for it and tell the story of Lindbergh to every boy 
in America, putting the emphasis in the story where it properly 
belongs. 


Christian Amusements 

QUESTION: Can a Christian indulge in dancings 
movies , card playing , smoking and such things? 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


109 


ANSWER: Of course, he can—so can she; provided that 
no violence is done to a conscience sensitively trained by 
doing so. I put that qualification in because some of us 
sear our consciences or so neglect them that we no longer hear 
them if they speak, or feel their prick, because they have lost 
the sharp edge of their needle. Then, we say that conscience 
does not tell us not to do this or that—and think we have 
cheated God for ever. 

But there is nothing wrong in cards or dances or theatres of 
themselves. What is wrong is to become obsessed by them or 
anything else that causes us to lower our ideals or neglect 
social or domestic duties. I once knew a lady who was so pos¬ 
sessed by the desire to attend religious conventions that her 
babies were neglected. She would have done much less harm 
in the world if she had taken a mild course of the theatre, or 
anything else mildly. You simply cannot dogmatize about 
these things. 

Anyhow, I have said again that Christianity isn’t a set of 
prohibitions—a lot of notices to keep off the grass. It’s an 
inward attitude to Jesus Christ—not to his teaching, merely, 
but to him—an attitude that, so to speak, takes the helm of 
your life and guides you toward the big purposes and the 
high unselfish ideals. We are being cursed by the number of 
our “Thou shalt nots.” 


Is Dancing Wicked? 

QUESTION: Can a Christian , apart altogether from 
the rightness or wrongness of these things , find time 
for them consistently with his Christian profession? 

ANSWER: It all depends on the individual Christian. 
I simply detest laying down arbitrary laws for anybody but 
myself. I can dance and I can play cards. But because I have 



no 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


done neither for twenty years, I should be a back number 
both with auction bridge or the Charleston. They did neither 
when I danced and played cards. 

But I’m quite sure I personally need some mental relaxa¬ 
tion. After a morning with the kind of sorrows and difficulties 
and shames that I get sometimes in my mail, and because 
of it, I feel that I want a new kind of bath—some deep and 
obliterating experience that will let me come forth clean and 
strong again. Now, there are folk who find that in cards or 
dancing. I should say that those amusements might suit them 
admirably if they do not lose their heads. Another factor— 
the one that prevented me from going on with these particular 
amusements—was that I had to do with folk who had gone to 
the dogs through over-indulgence in one or other of these 
amusements. Paul laid down the Christian rule, “All things 
are lawful but all things are not expedient.” And that other, 
“If anything make my brother to offend, I will not do that 
thing,” In his case, it was meat offered to idols and after¬ 
wards sold in the meat-markets. He saw no sin in eating it. 
But more sensitive persons did. Hence, like the fine Christian 
he was, he abstained from the thing that might cause difficulty 
to them. That is the essence of the Christian spirit; the spirit 
of service and sacrifice. If we are ruled by that spirit, we 
need no laws. 


Was It Pilate or Christ? 

QUESTION: After your sermon last Sunday 
morning , when you claimed that real success was 
only won by service and even sacrifice , some of my 
friends said that facts were facts and that bootleggers 
and crooks were among the really successful folk 
of today . What can I say to them? 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


hi 


ANSWER: Well, I don’t want to be rude enough to say 
that if your friends regard bootlegging as a successful form of 
commerce just now, you should change your friends, but apart 
from any moral consideration, it is not the occupation that a 
timid man like myself would choose. The mortality rate 
among bootleggers is rather high. If that means success, it is 
not my conception of success. 

But is success getting rich at any price of morals? Is that 
what your friends mean by success? If so, the selling of what 
the dope fiends call “snow” is a much more profitable occupa¬ 
tion even than peddling moonshine liquor. It is true that you 
leave a widening trail of twisted minds and drug-maddened 
bodies behind you but what of that if it means that you can 
exchange your Ford car for a Cadillac? There’s a risk that 
you may get to like “snow” yourself and that in Leavenworth 
it will be worse than hell because you cannot get it, but that’s 
another risk you must take. 

Your friends haven’t taken stock of their own philosophy 
and its meanings. I’m getting older and the older I get, the 
more I suspect that the real happiness lies in being able to 
say, “My meat is doing the will of my Father.” That inner 
satisfaction is worth more than gold, though your friends 
haven’t discovered it yet. William Wetmore Storey wrote a 
poem called “Io Victis.” Here are a few lines from it: 

“They only the victory win, 

Who have fought the good fight and have vanquished the 
demon that tempts us within; 

Who have held to their faith unseduced by the prize that 
the world holds on high; 

Who have dared for a high cause to suffer, resist, fight— 
if needs be, to die. 

Speak History! Who are life’s victors? Unroll thy long 
annals and say, 



112 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


Are they those whom the world called the victors, who won 
the success of a day? 

The martyrs, or Nero? The Spartans who fell at 
Thermopylae’s tryst, 

Or the Persians and Xerxes? His judges or Socrates? Pilate 
or Christ? 

Well, what does history actually say? Was it Pilate or 
Christ? That answer gives you the answer, whatever it may 
be in your own mind, to the great universal answer to the 
whole question in every life. 


This Volstead Nonsense? 

QUESTION: In view of the growing reports of 
bootlegging and blind pigs , don't you think we had 
better end this Volstead nonsense? 

ANSWER: Which Volstead nonsense? Do you mean the 
good law or the rotten method of its enforcement? My own 
impression is that there are more bootleggers being prosecuted 
and more blind pigs being revealed than ever before. The 
anti-prohibitionist press gives publicity to all of them; I don’t 
know why, because it seems to me that the new activity of 
enforcement officers is not likely to be encouraging to the anti¬ 
prohibitionists. 

No, on the question of law enforcement, I am a follower of 
Theodore Roosevelt. He said, the best test of whether a law 
is good or bad, is to enforce it. If it is good, its enforcement 
will prove its goodness. If it is bad, its enforcement will prove 
its badness. Let’s rigidly enforce every law, good or bad. If it’s 
bad, the people will soon get it changed. If it’s good, they 
won’t want to. 

I think the first slackening of our tremendous prosperity 
since prohibition is coming. I also think that an era of 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


113 

slighter and more patchy prosperity will reveal how much pro¬ 
hibition has done to fortify us against the rainy day. 


The Anti-Saloon League and Smith 

QUESTION: What is your comment on the denun¬ 
ciation by Stanley High of the Anti-Saloon League? 
His denunciation was chiefly concerned with the 
League's championship and endorsement of Senator 
Smith . 

ANSWER: Stanley High is an official minister of the 
Methodist Church. He is one of our youngest ministers, being 
around thirty-two years of age. The significance of his denun¬ 
ciation lies in the fact that he is one of the most prominent of 
the leaders of the youth of the church. My comment can be 
expressed best by the statement that when I read his tremen¬ 
dous castigation, I wrote him saying, “God bless you, Stanley 
High.” 

The Anti-Saloon League is sometimes described as the spear¬ 
head of the churches and particularly, of the Methodist 
Church. I am absolutely in favor of prohibition if it can be 
enforced honestly. It is not being enforced honestly and the 
result is that law-makers and law-upholders are coming to 
think of all law with contempt. That—if it is carried far 
enough—will eat away the very foundations of democratic 
government which is based on a fundamental respect for and 
observance of law. That respect, again, is based on a general 
ethical standard, running right through the life of the people. 
Any organization that endorses a candidate who while occu¬ 
pying an office from the people, for the protection of the 
people from great financial interests, yet takes slush money 
from the very interests he is appointed to protect the people 



STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


114 


from, is a traitor to the fundamental principles of American 
government. Any organization that, just because that man 
happens to give lip service to the Eighteenth Amendment, 
gives him its endorsement, has done violence to those ethical 
principles for which the churches stand. 

If the churches do not stand for that, they may as well shut 
up shop, so far as the youth of the churches,—the most honest 
part of their constituency—is concerned. The Anti-Saloon 
League has illustrated, in a terrible way, that fanaticism can 
be the most immoral thing in the world, and has deserved every 
condemnatory word that Stanley High said about it. God 
bless him and every other man who has the courage to oppose 
himself to the general ethical lethargy of the churches. 


Predestination 

QUESTION: Do you believe in Predestination? 

ANSWER: That question is only part of a long letter 
from which I want to read a longer extract. Here it is: “A 
very learned Bible student taught our Sunday School class last 
summer. I have been taught that if Judas had repented, after 
betraying Christ, he would have been saved. But this teacher 
claims that Judas was born for this purpose—to fulfil the 
Scriptures and that everyone of us is born with a definite pur¬ 
pose; no matter what we do, we cannot get away from it. If 
this be true, what is the use of churches and missionaries? We 
are taught that Jesus is a kind and loving Savior but if Judas 
was born to betray Christ, and does so, fulfilling his mission in 
life, why should he be eternally damned ?” 

My answer to that question is that Predestination as thus 
taught is an insult to God and about the most depressing and 
pessimistic doctrine that could be promulgated among us 
humans. It is not Christian, at all, but simply the out-of-date 




TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


ii5 


scientific teaching on the effects of heredity, in another form, 
that existed among some of the Jews, long before the time of 
Christ. It is illustrated as a popular superstition in the case of 
the disciples asking Christ, “Master, did this man or his 
parents sin, that he was born blind?” I hope you remember 
the scornful answer of Jesus. 

It seems to me that you have answered your own question 
in part. The teaching of a limited predestination is totally at 
variance with His character and teaching. “God so loved the 
world—,” said John. “Other sheep I have which are not of 
this fold,” said Jesus. “Them also I must bring that there 
may be one flock, one shepherd.” But what he said is nothing 
to what his general attitude was. He taught the Universal 
Fatherhood of God and that our human race was a family. 

You can never go wrong when you think these things out in 
terms of the family. Is it conceivable that any father worth 
the name, would ordain that one or several of his children 
should be predestined to be out of the family? That does 
not mean that it is not possible for one or more of the children 
to put themselves out of the family. Judas did, though I’m 
not going to be so positive as to say that even he did that 
eternally. 

No, there are slight traces of a teaching of predestination in 
the Bible; but it is a universal predestination to salvation, to 
life, not to damnation and death. Even if it were argued that 
Paul teaches a predestination to death, that would not affect 
my belief in the universal saviorhood of Christ. When Paul and 
Jesus seem to differ, I take my stand with Jesus. 

Here’s something else. Trust your own feeling about Christ 
and his teaching. I get a lot of letters against the Pope but it 
sometimes seems to me that folk create their own popes when 
they fail to trust their own interpretation of the Scriptures and 
their own thought about Christ. My people here make me their 



n6 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


pope when they take what I say concerning the teaching of 
Christ as final without their own reading and thought. That’s 
wrong. And that is why I try always to be so careful to say 
here that this or that is simply my own opinion. 

The best theology for you is that which is forged on the 
anvil of your own hard thinking after diligent search of the 
Scriptures, not weighing each part of the Scriptures equally, 
but always making Christ the touchstone of everything. At the 
same time, listen to everybody with what respect you can, 
including this Question Box. We try here, not to be dogmatic, 
but reasonable. Above everything else, we want to put the 
authority of Christ supreme—above Paul, above the ablest 
Bible teacher who ever lived; above everybody and every¬ 
thing. He is the final arbitrator. 


Should Salacious Literature 
Be Censored? 

QUESTION: What is your opinion of magazines 
of the type I mention in this letter? If you are op¬ 
posed to them , would you mind saying whether they 
should he censored so that hoys and girls of high 
school age may he saved from reading them? 

ANSWER: I am rigidly opposed to almost every form of 
censorship and think that the way to make folk, especially 
young folk, curious about anything is to forbid them to read it 
or do it. You know what Mark Twain said about the apple. 
He said, “The woman ate the apple not because she wanted it 
but because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbid¬ 
ding the serpent. Then she would have eaten that.” Even now, 
half these illicit magazines are read just because they are more 
or less under a ban. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


111 

Moreover, I agree with Lynn Harold Hough that very few 
men are good enough to be trusted with unrestricted power, 
as the power of a censor would be. It would develop into a 
very dangerous form of tyranny. We saw something of that 
during the war. 

If parents would take the advice of the folk who know, and 
tell their children before the matter becomes an object of 
curiosity with them, the whole of the facts about sex—the 
whole of the facts, without any sentimental twaddle, but as 
coldly and scientifically as they would tell facts about astron¬ 
omy, much of this illicit curiosity would be avoided. I heard 
about a boy the other day whose father had, at a compara¬ 
tively early age, told him everything—everything. Another 
boy began to tell this well-instructed boy a salacious story 
when the boy stopped him by saying, “Shucks, I’ve known 
about that for years and you’ve got it wrong, anyway.” That 
kind of boy is in less danger than the half-instructed boy or 
girl, either from salacious magazines or from any similar 
source. 


Youth and the Lipstick 

QUESTION: Please give me your honest opinion 
of the use of rouge , lipsticks and short skirts. 

ANSWER: I don’t want to because I don’t believe that 
my honest opinion is worth anything at all. You see, I’m 
getting near to fifty and that outclasses me. I don’t believe 
that any man over thirty-five is qualified to pass judgment on 
the matter. I was brought up in a generation that honestly 
believed that any woman who used lipsticks and rouge was a 
bad woman. She generally was. Ask your father, or, better, 
your mother. Short skirts simply WERE NOT. I remember 
a female cousin of mine coming into our home when I was a 



n8 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


young boy and saying that she had been stopped on the street 
by a gentleman telling her that he thought she was holding 
her skirt too high. She was holding it about seven inches above 
the floor. No, in my day, they preferred that skirts should be 
eight inches below the sidewalk and have six inches of microbe 
deposit on them all round. 

Now, the difficulty is that these things were so in the years 
when the men of my generation were passing through their 
impressionable years. Those are the years when you get ideas 
rooted in your minds and these become preconceptions in after 
years, simply making valuable opinions impossible, because 
the opinions we old fogies hold are so fearfully biased. So, 
please don’t ask me, though, personally, I believe with all my 
heart in the majority of the present fashions in female dress. 
I’m a little nervous lest the girls should overdo the lipstick 
and paint business, however, but then, they don’t do it for 
me, so what has it to do with anything I think? 


Would Light Wines Cure Us? 

QUESTION: Consider the vast amount of harm that 
is being done amongst young people by the hip flask , 
don't you think that the public sale of light wines and 
beers ought to be welcomed as a step in the right 
direction? 

ANSWER: Even if I did, I don’t think there is the 
slightest chance of light wines and beers coming into public 
vogue in this country. $2,500,000,000 of money that previ¬ 
ously went into the saloon business to the destruction of health 
and prosperity is now going to make more and better homes, 
stronger industries with more consequent employment and 
general all-round improvement of public wealth and fitness. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


119 


Apart from the fighters on both sides, I believe that the aver¬ 
age American, when it comes to a show-down, will see this and 
will also see to it that no retrograde step is taken against the 
prosperity of the country. 

But I don’t believe in this hip flask business. That does 
not mean that I do not believe that a certain number of young 
fools of both sexes are using hip flasks. Like every other viola¬ 
tion of the eighteenth amendment, this habit of a small minor¬ 
ity is enlarged upon to the slandering of the general youth of 
this nation, out of all proportion to the facts. 

Third, a taste for whisky is not cured by light wines and 
beers. Once a man has the whisky habit, he needs whisky to 
keep it alive. Nothing weaker will do. It’s just moonshine to 
say that light wines and beers will stop folk drinking moon¬ 
shine. They haven’t enough kick in them, as any moonshine 
drinker will tell you. But if you really want a good moonshine 
drinker’s opinion, you had better get it quick. They are dying 
off very fast and that is going to be the ultimate solution of 
the whisky business in America. 


Luck and Predestination 

QUESTION: What is your opinion of Predestina¬ 
tion? To me it is the most obnoxious word in the 
Bible , but the older I grow the more I am forced to 
believe in it. 

ANSWER: The word predestination does not occur in 
the Bible at all, though the verb, predestinate, does. I do not 
find it obnoxious, at all, because, while I believe in predestina¬ 
tion, I also believe that God willeth that all men everywhere 
should repent. That predestinates everybody to salvation. By 
that I mean that, so far as the desire and purpose of God is 
concerned, men will be saved, though their own free-will may 



120 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


enable them to succeed in defeating the purposes of God to 
their own destruction. 

Then, you go on to tell me your life story and ask me if 
I believe that one person is born unlucky and another lucky. 
I don’t. I certainly don’t think that predestination has any¬ 
thing to do with one’s success in business. The Bible word has 
only to do with the salvation of the soul. Success in business 
would be a bad thing for some men. 

I always have a feeling that if Abraham Lincoln had won out 
in some of his earlier battles, he might have been content with 
what he had won and America might never have known him. 
He never was successful, in the worldly sense. Even as Presi¬ 
dent, he only had six weeks of the Presidency of a united 
nation. His story, both in business, in love, and in his political 
career, was all battle, tragedy and weariness. Yet what a 
legacy he left to America. 

H. G. Wells reckons him as one of the seven greatest men 
that humanity has known. The other six were all what we 
should call unlucky, today. Socrates died of poison, Jesus died 
of crucifixion. Buddha had to give up wife, children, every¬ 
thing. The Emperor Asoka of Japan, the Messiah of the East, 
did the same. I am speaking from memory but I think the 
same was true of every one of the seven greatest men that 
Wells names as the greatest men the world has known. If so, 
what do you mean by success and luck? 

I have a little cottage on the other side of Lake Michigan 
where I am spending weeks just now in preparing my answers 
to these questions. It happened that while I was thinking 
over the answer to your question a fog came over the lake. 
Everything was blotted out. Everything was murky and 
obscure. Then, the sun shone out and things became even 
more clear than they generally are. That sometimes happens 
after fog. How wonderfully clear everything was. Paul says, 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


12 I 


“Now, we see through a glass darkly.’’ And there is no doubt 
about that. 

You speak of a man much luckier than you. Well, that 
makes it more difficult for him. I was born in England and 
still get some English newspapers. There’s an old abbey there 
that is falling into ruin. Do you know which wall is in greatest 
danger? The south wall. The sun has done more damage to 
the stone than a thousand years of north wind. 

Can Protestantism Combine? 

QUESTION: Don't you think that if the Protestant 
churches combined as one denomination , they would 
accomplish more than now? 

ANSWER: I most certainly do. Of course, the divisions 
of Protestantism follow certain psychological types. I mean 
that there are really folk who are born Baptists by tempera¬ 
ment and Methodists by temperament and so on. The divisions 
of Protestantism are also the protest of an increasingly free 
humanity against anything like regimentation in religion. 

But the joker in the pack is that there never was a time 
when the theological differences between the churches were so 
slight as now and there never was a time when the Protestant 
churches were so severely regimented as now. Congregation¬ 
alism is based on the independence of the individual church, 
yet Congregationalism is all linked up, church with church, 
in a perfectly astonishing way. Baptists don’t insist very 
strongly on immersion. At any rate, there are numerous Bap¬ 
tists who don’t and, speaking about Methodists, I’m not sure 
that fifty per cent know what the fundamental emphasis of 
Methodism is. 

Yet, here we are, not only divided from each other, but 
actually fighting each other with solid cash in millions, in the 
form of missionary money for the maintenance of dying 



122 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


churches and villages in small towns where there are often ten 
churches instead of the necessary two or three. 


The Causes of National Decay 

QUESTION: I understand that you think that 
history repeats itself. Do you think that the leading 
countries , like England , America , and France , are 
therefore heading the same way as Rome? 

ANSWER: There are spiritual laws governing the life of 
nations, just as those same laws govern the lives of individuals. 
If England, or America, break those laws, they will die, as 
ancient Rome died. But it will not be because of some kind of 
predestined doom, but because they broke the law. Immoral¬ 
ity, extravagance, irreligion, are the causes of national decay. 


Can the Universe Die? 

QUESTION: What is your view of the cyclical 
theory of energy in the universe and do you think 
that the universe is getting older and less energetic? 

ANSWER: I understand the cyclical theory of energy in 
the universe to be that there was a gigantic period, millions of 
millions of years long, during which the total of life and 
energy in the universe was waxing and growing. There is 
another period, in the midst of which we are now supposed 
to be, during which that energy is waning and diminishing. 
That is what I understand the cyclical theory to be, but I don’t 
know how it can be more than a theory. 

How can the sum total of life and energy in the universe 
be measured? If it is to be measured, are we not in danger 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


123 


of forgetting to measure something? For instance, if it had 
all been measured one hundred years ago, might not the scien¬ 
tists of that age have left entirely out of all calculation, the 
energy reposing in atoms and electrons? Indeed, it’s pretty 
certain they would because they knew nothing about atoms or 
electrons. It’s a serious omission because they tell me that if 
one atom explodes, it is going to smash the world, and there 
are 30,000 in one drop of water—or so they tell me. But if the 
scientists left all that energy out of count, one hundred years 
ago, how do we know the world is losing power? 

Henry Norton Russell, whose significance in science you will 
appreciate better than I, and that tremendously clever astron¬ 
omer of Cambridge, England, Professor Eddington, say there 
is nothing to the cyclical theory. I’m going to trust them for 
the period of my own lifetime, anyhow. 


Ought We to Be Tempted? 

QUESTION: Ruth Snyder wrote an article in 
which she said that a little girl had asked her how 
God could allow men like Gray to he alive in order to 
undermine the morals of folk like herself. Ruth 
Snyder said that she had often wondered about that 
herself. So have I. What can you say about it? 

ANSWER: Ruth Snyder thought that an omnipotent God 
would not allow Gray to tempt her. I have not heard Gray’s 
account of it, but I daresay that he wondered why an omnip¬ 
otent God allowed Ruth Snyders around. 

The real question seems to be whether God is omnipotent in 
a world of men and women. And my answer is that he is not. 
There was a point in history up till when he was absolutely 
omnipotent. That was until the moment when man was 



124 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


created. At that moment, and by that act, God sacrificed his 
omnipotence in order to create a being who could have fellow¬ 
ship with himself. That was the price he paid for the creation 
of the human free-will. For, of course, the human will is free. 
Society is founded on that fact. 

We hold men responsible for what they do because we 
regard them as free either to do it or not to do it. That is why 
we are fond of baseball. If the striker had to strike the ball, 
whether he wanted to strike it or not, there would be no base¬ 
ball crowds and no baseball scandals. Trial by jury would be a 
folly if we had only to judge men and women who couldn’t 
help doing what they did. They would never be guilty. 

It was an enormous risk that God took. But he could not 
have made the man that would be worthy of the divine com¬ 
panionship without taking that risk and making that sacrifice. 
An automatically good man would have been a mere machine. 
God has enough machines already. 

The experiment has been justified. Man has chosen the 
better, rather than the worse, all through history, in spite of 
the Grays and Snyders, who are a very small minority. Prog¬ 
ress has been made. It’s a long time since the cave man and 
the cave man is a long way below us. We really have done a 
lot of climbing. Man is more godlike, more human, more ten¬ 
der, more chaste, more sober today than ever. He is justifying 
the divine experiment and we should all rejoice and take 
courage. 


The Star of Bethlehem 

Q UESTION: Is there any astronomical justification 
for the idea that there was an actual star of Bethlehem? 

ANSWER: I’m not much of an astronomer, but I was 
interested to notice a news item the other day from Cam¬ 
bridge, Massachusetts, which said that the comet now appear- 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


125 


ing (December, 1927) in the western heavens may have been 
the star of Bethlehem. Comets have an elliptical orbit and do 
not recur, in their appearing to our eyes, with complete regu¬ 
larity, as stars do, as planets do. Halley’s comet was long 
regarded as the star of Bethlehem, appearing as it did at very 
irregular intervals, through the ages; apparently about every 
seventy-six years. 

But I think we miss one of the points of the story if we think 
of the Star of Bethlehem like that. Halley’s comet is a very 
big affair, visible to everybody when it appears, lighting up the 
whole sky. The star of Bethlehem was not of that order. 
Herod would have known something about it, instead of 
being entirely ignorant of it as told in Matthew II, verse 7. 
These men got their knowledge of it by very deep research 
and in conditions that excluded the use of powerful telescopes. 

Nobody seems to have known anything about it except 
themselves and perhaps other Magi throughout the world. 
Their merit just lay in that; that they had the faith to follow 
the very dim gleam of light they had, fully trusting it. It 
brought them through. 

Is Christmas a Pagan Festival? 

QUESTION: Is Christmas a pagan or a Christian 
Festival? 

ANSWER: It is a Christian festival and the more so 
because it contains so many of what you call pagan elements. 
The mistletoe was the emblem, among the Druids, of life 
derived from life, because it had no root of its own, so far as 
they understood, but derived its life from another plant. It 
also typified the continuance of life because it was one of the 
plants which winter did not kill. I daresay that the holly and 
other evergreens had the same symbolism to them and to other 
pagan religionists. 



126 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


But a thing is not wrong because it is pagan, and because 
a religious or social practice had its origin in some pagan idea 
does not mean that we must despise it. Paganism, at its best, 
was man’s groping for that Light which lighted every man, 
and a true pagan, working and walking by the light he had, 
might be just as acceptable to God as many a Christian. 

It was the same with the yule log. On December 21, prob¬ 
ably the old Christmas Day, the sun passes out of the winter 
solstice of the heavens. The sun was the God of Fire and the 
God of Life, but, having descended to the low shining of the 
20th day of December, he began to increase his shining after 
that day and was, in a sense, reborn. 

Then came Christianity and after a time, Christianity be¬ 
came dominant over the old pagan ideas. Not entirely at first; 
not entirely now. And the Christian Church, with some wis¬ 
dom, as I think, gathered up these old pagan symbols and 
made them express the fuller truth of Christ. I think it is a 
fine symbol of the catholicity of the ancient church that it 
could take these old symbols and charge them with the new 
Christian meaning. I wish we were better able to do that with 
some of the pagan ideas of the pagan peoples of the world 
today. 

Christianity is not something to be set over against other 
expressions of the universal religious craving in the soul of 
man. It is the summing up of all those ideas and hungers and 
we ought to gather them into it more effectively than we have 
done lately. 

The English Church Prayer Book 

QUESTION: Can you tell the public what the row 
in England concerning the new Prayer Book is about? 

ANSWER: Briefly, there are two parties in the English 
Church: the High Church and the Low Church. The High 




TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


127 


Church party says that the ancient English Episcopal Church 
did some things that today are regarded as illegal but which 
are necessary for the proper observance of the services of the 
Lord’s House. They say that everything depends on what 
was done in the second year of the reign of King Edward VI 
who died in 1553. The claim is that then, confession was prac¬ 
tised in the English Church and lavish ceremonial vestments 
were worn before the altar, making the Sacrament much more 
like the Roman Mass than it is in Protestant Churches. In¬ 
deed, I think they claim that the English Church is not Prot¬ 
estant, in that the English Reformation was merely political, 
being the effort of King Henry VIII to throw off the authority 
of the pope merely to add another wife to his already large 
collection. Prayers for the dead are also involved in the same 
question. 

Thus, for twenty years an attempt has been made to so 
revise the Prayer Book of the church as to go back to these 
ancient—and as some think—Roman customs. In addi¬ 
tion, there is the vexed question—in England it is still a vexed 
question, though here it seems to have been settled against the 
husband—of whether a wife should promise to obey her 
husband. 

The English Church being a State Church and the Prayer 
Book being one of the laws of England, the Parliament had to 
authorize the use of the new Prayer Book. In the House of 
Lords, the Senate of the Parliament, there are, I think, forty 
bishops and they carried the bill for the new Prayer Book but 
by a slight majority. The lower house, consisting of elected 
representatives of the people, threw out the proposed changes. 

Agreeing With a Cardinal! 

QUESTION: What is your answer to one of the 
latest bans placed by the Roman Catholic Church on 



128 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


that song , Beautiful Isle of Somewhere? It is often 
requested over the radio and used at funerals . Why 
should they have banned it? 

ANSWER: The answer is, they haven’t, so far as I am 
aware. All that happened was that one of the American Cardi¬ 
nals, I think His Eminence of Baltimore, expressed his per¬ 
sonal objection to the song as too nebulous to be worthily used 
at Christian funerals. The Sunday following, I had to answer 
a question as to whether I agreed with the Cardinal and I said, 
I did—with the result that I received all kinds of protests 
and demurrers. 

But it isn’t true that anybody has banned it and it doesn’t 
help the sweetness of human relations to say they have. Even 
Cardinals have their personal preferences and antipathies and 
are, of course, quite at liberty to express them. Neither you nor 
I are asked to agree with them, though, on this occasion I do. 

I think that compared with “Abide With Me” or “Nearer 
My God to Thee” or especially with, “The King of Love My 
Shepherd Is,” “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere” is a piece of 
nebulous pap. 

Can Repenting Sinners Reach 
a Saints’ Heaven? 

QUESTION: Does the sinner who has lived a vile 
life and who has broken most of the commandments 
succeed , by a late repentance y in reaching the same 
kind of Heaven and reap the same kind of reward as 
is reached and reaped by a good , pure character who 
has lived all his life as best he could? 

ANSWER: My answer to that question is, “Yes,” because 
Heaven is not a reward. It is the home of God’s children, not 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


129 


their reward. If they are home in time, from their swine- 
troughs, then they come to the feast. So long as we think of 
Heaven as reward of merit, we shall get rebellious against that 
state of things, but if we think of everybody as God thinks of 
them, as his children, some of them prodigal and some of them 
who have never left home but who, like the elder son in the 
parable are worse than if they had, then we shall get the right 
picture. 

Read, as well as Luke 15, Matthew 20 where the story of 
the Laborers in the Vineyard is told. Read the story of the 
Thief on the Cross. Read what Jesus said about the gentiles, 
the publicans, and sinners crowding into the Kingdom in front 
of the church folk and you will see that this is unquestionably 
his teaching. And I guess that it is his teaching that is going 
to settle things—not our opinions. 

You may say, Well, if so, why not have a journey into the 
far country? In reply to that possible question, let me ask you 
one, Why don’t you have a debauching night in New York or 
Paris? Surely not because you are afraid of being found out 
but because it is always better to be true to the Father in 
Heaven or the wife on earth, apart altogether from the ques¬ 
tion of rewards and punishments. It’s a question of moral 
cleanness and family pride—pride in the earthly or heavenly 
family to which we belong. 

Water and the Spirit 

QUESTION: What did Christ mean when he said 
to Nicodemus that a man must be born of water and 
of the spirit before he can enter into the kingdom of 
God? Where is the kingdom of God? 

ANSWER: Taking your second question first, the plainest 
answer to that question is Christ’s own answer in Luke 17 and 



130 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


verses 20-21. “And being asked of the Pharisees, when the 
kingdom of God cometh, he answered them and said, The 
kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall 
they say, Lo, here! or, There! for lo, the kingdom of God is 
within you.” 

The kingdom of God is not Heaven. It is not some future 
state or place. All the Italians or Japanese, wherever they 
may be throughout the world, unless they have been natural¬ 
ized in another country, are members of their native king¬ 
dom. Did not Mussolini say a few months ago that wherever 
a true Italian was, there was Italy—or something like that? 
Well, it is the like with the kingdom of God. It is wherever 
there is a heart that beats true to the purposes of God. Heaven 
is only the capital of that realm. It is here and not yonder. 
It is in every spirit-filled heart. 

Now, Nicodemus wanted to know how all that happened. 
Christ referred him to the Jewish process of naturalization, by 
which a man left all his clothes on the bank of a stream and 
went into the stream to come out on the other side to find 
other clothes waiting for him. That was how Christian baptism 
had its origin. It was an act signifying an inner renunciation 
of self; a cutting off of the old self-centered life. Do that, 
says Christ, not so much the outward act as the inner act of 
self-renunciation; and the spirit of God will rush into the 
empty life as wind rushes into a vacuum. That is the simplest 
way I know of saying what Christ said so much more wonder¬ 
fully than any of the rest of us can say it. 


Theology 



QUESTION: Just what is meant by being saved? 
Is there not some better term than this to be used by 
evangelists and Christian workers in talking with 
sinners? 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


£3J 

I don’t like that word “sinners” either, as 
designating a class, or a group. The fact is that, to the aver¬ 
age man, all our religious phraseologies are outworn but the 
difficulty is to discover new phraseologies which still retain 
eternal truth. To find new words is easy. To have them ex¬ 
press the old abiding truths is tremendously hard. 

“Sinners” in the New Testament for instance, almost al¬ 
ways means “street-walkers.” I should not like to say that the 
effect of that on our thought has been that we think only of 
outward and social sin when we think of sin at all. But it is 
a fact that we do too freely tag the socially virtuous folk as 
spiritually whole and the socially vicious folk as the only sin¬ 
ners; when, as a matter of fact, Jesus taught that the folk who 
were in danger of hell fire were those who were selfish with 
large professions of religion, who didn’t give the cup of cold 
water and act kindly to their neighbors. He never taught that 
religion was a matter of belief. He always taught that re¬ 
ligion was a matter of conduct—of unselfish and, if need be, 
sacrificial conduct. 

I myself feel that the way to express it all in modern phrase¬ 
ology is to say that all sin is selfishness; selfishness against 
God in refusing to acknowledge, in our conduct, that our life 
is derived from him and is a stewardship for him; selfishness 
against men and nature in refusing to recognize that we all 
belong to the same family of living things and especially to the 
closer family of human things. Sin, so regarded, leads to every 
kind of separation; separation from God, the central source of 
life and love; and separation from man because it treats him 
or her as our prey instead of our comrade. And separation is 
death; what Herbert Spencer defined death as being; the in¬ 
ability of an organism to correspond with its environment; 
our environment being God on the one hand and man on the 
other hand. 



132 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


The death of Christ, as I understand it, was his deliberate 
act of determination to live unto God and man and not unto 
himself. In that aspect, that death is the signpost to true 
life and selfless service. Those who follow him, accepting his 
leadership, are delivered from the bondage of death or selfish 
living into the liberty of the children of God. 

That is my theology, so far as I can interpret it to myself 
at this time. That being the setting of the facts, it seems to 
follow that being saved is really being delivered from the death 
of self-seeking and self-aggrandizement. Salvation is life, life 
lived in unison with God and man. Moffatt frequently trans¬ 
lates the word “savior” by the word champion or hero. That 
is what Christ is, the hero or champion of a new and selfless 
way of living. There is another Hebrew word for “save,” 
than the word which is often translated, “deliver.” It literally 
means, “to bring to life.” The New Testament nearly always 
means just that, “to bring to life” and that is what happens 
when Christ brings us to realize that life is from a great parent 
stem and root, that he himself is the stem of that universal 
vine—and that every part of life is a part of the one vine. If 
we sever ourselves from the universal purpose and refuse the 
life of universal service, we cut ourselves off from life. 


Don’t Change the Word “Catholic” 

QUESTION: What do we mean when we use the 
word 11 Catholic 11 in the Creed? Do you think folk 
understand that expression? Don't you think it ought 
to he changed? 

ANSWER: The word “Catholic” means “Universal.” I 
have many friends in the Roman Catholic Church, but I should 
not like to give my Roman Catholic friends the monopoly of 




TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


133 


that word. When I say that I belong to and believe in the Holy 
Catholic Church, I like to think that it is a church bigger than 
the churches—a church that includes Roman Catholic and 
Lutheran and Greek Orthodox and Protestant and every kind 
of church. 

I am just in the middle of reading Rupert Hughes’ splendid 
life of George Washington. And I am right in the place where 
the regiment of Pennsylvania and the regiment of Maryland 
and the regiment of Virginia were so prone to quarrel about 
their particular regiments that they forgot they all belonged to 
a great army that was bigger than all of them put together. 
That is what I mean. I want to remember the army as well 
as the various regiments that make up the army. 

It’s like that with the army we all belong to. Some of it is 
on earth and some in Heaven; but I like to think of it as the 
one great army—and I do when I say in the Creed, “I believe 
in the Holy Catholic Church.” 

Was His Father a Christian? 

QUESTION: Can one be considered a Christian 
who does not believe in what the Creed calls 11 ever¬ 
lasting life?” 

ANSWER: That question is only part of a very delight¬ 
ful and fraternal letter which I wish I could read to you all. 
The writer says that he enjoyed the fullest and most free com¬ 
munion with his father as a boy and that they used to take 
long walks and have great talks together about everything in 
the world. That made me thank God that there were still men 
who had had fathers like that. Then, my friend says that his 
father seldom discussed everlasting life and conveyed the im¬ 
pression that he thought the probabilities were rather 
against it. 



134 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


Well, if you are asking whether your father was a Christian 
in spite of all that, I fancy that, knowing him as you did, you 
are better able to be assured of his real Christianity than any¬ 
thing I could give you. If you mean that you are persuaded 
he was—or would be persuaded he was—if you could get that 
one point settled about him; all I have to say is that a Chris¬ 
tian is one who follows Christ even in the darkness of his own 
doubts like Thomas. 

Christianity is just Christ, being loyal to Christ without 
hope of life or reward or anything. I have a great love for 
Thomas and sometimes think he was the best of the lot when 
he said, knowing that Christ was going to Jerusalem and 
would be killed, “Let us also go that we may die with him. ,, 
Thomas doesn’t seem to have believed a thing but he did 
believe in the friend of his heart so well and so strongly that 
he thought it better to die with Christ than live without him; 
thought it better to be alone with him than in the crowd with¬ 
out him. That is Christianity, and what a man believes after 
that doesn’t matter. 


When was Anno Domini? 

QUESTION: I have read somewhere that our calcu¬ 
lation of Anno Domini is wrong hy several years and 
that Jesus was horn either several years before or after 
the date he was supposed to have been born. Do you 
know anything about this f and , if so , can you make 
it clear to me? 

ANSWER: I do know something about that. It is inter¬ 
esting but not vital. So long as Jesus was born; so long as that 
blessed sun did rise, with healing in his wings, the exact hour 
of the sunrise now that he has arisen, is not vital. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


i 3 S 


But what a wonderful thing it is that the birth of this peas¬ 
ant of Galilee should be the watershed of history; that a baby 
born in a manger should have so affected the world that every 
date in history is either reckoned as being so many years 
before his birth or so many years after it. He is the Great 
Divide. From him, we reckon all the sources of all the 
streams of tendency that have affected the lives of men. So, 
we say, Julius Caesar was born 55 years before Christ and 
the Declaration of Independence was written 1776 years 
after Christ. 

The significant thing is that it is all reckoned as being before 
or after the birth of this peasant girl’s baby at Bethlehem— 
a place we should never have heard about but for that, and 
which belongs to a country that, but for him, would have no 
world significance today. That fact wants a lot of thinking 
about and a lot of explaining. Why is he the watershed of 
history? That wants thinking about. I myself, do not see how 
the conclusion can be avoided by any unprejudiced man—he 
happens to be the hardest man in the world to find—that that 
peasant girl’s baby, was the very Incarnation of the Divine. 

But about the date of his birth—here is the surprising thing: 
It was not fixed as the watershed of history until around the 
middle of the sixth century—around 550 A. D. (you see how 
easily we fall into that Anno Domini habit). An abbot named 
Dionysius Exiguus, at Rome, suggested in a Latin book called 
Cyclus Paschalis, that Christians should henceforth date every¬ 
thing from the birth of Christ. The idea received universal 
and immediate endorsement and was quickly adopted. Five 
hundred and fifty years after a relatively obscure event gives 
plenty of time for error in calculating that event with exact¬ 
ness. There was, undoubtedly, error in calculating the year of 
our Lord’s birth—an error of several years. But how many 
years, nobody knows. 



136 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


You will want to know how it is that if 550 years is long 
enough to create an error, 1927 years should not be too long 
to correct it. The answer to that is that during the past hun¬ 
dred years, at least, there has grown up what we ought to call 
a Science of History. Men wrote history before, but nowadays 
there is as much research into historical data as there is into 
disease. Old engraved stones, old letters and books, old build¬ 
ings and graves—everything is being ransacked, almost micro¬ 
scopically examined and carefully checked, with astonishing 
results. 

We are now able to correct errors centuries old and sometimes 
centuries wrong in historical questions. One of the greatest 
fields of exploration is that of the ancient laws and records of 
the Roman Empire, frequently found in the form of stones, 
monuments and buildings dated with the year of the Emperor 
or Governor. Thus, we come to know two things that are very 
important about the birth of our Lord. Already, we know that 
Jesus was born before the death of Herod. Now, from Roman 
sources, we know that Herod died in the spring of B. C. 4. So 
there is at least a four-year error in our ancient reckoning. 
But how long before the death of Herod was Jesus born? We 
know that he was born during a census of the Roman Empire 
undertaken by Quirinius (Luke tells us that). That census 
was timed for B. C. 8 and was undertaken in most provinces 
of the Roman Empire at that time. But there was a quarrel 
taking place between Herod and his two sons at that time 
which made the taking of the census impossible in that year. 
So, sometime between B. C. 8 and B. C. 4 Jesus was born. 


Did Jesus Exist? 

QUESTION: Have you any proof outside the Bible, 
that Christ ever lived on the earth? 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


137 


ANSWER: Yes. Thousands! Here are a few of my 
thousands: (1) The existence of the Christian Church —What¬ 
ever its character or value, it is the largest and most universal 
institution in the world. It is bigger than Masonry or the 
Knights of Columbus or any other or all of the other institu¬ 
tions combined. Somebody started it. Who? 

(2) America —China has more coal, more iron, more gold 
fields, more people, more ancient learning, more history, more 
everything worth while except Jesus. America hasn’t very 
much of him but what she has is a dynamic accounting for 
our American civilization—or whatever we have in America 
that is worth calling civilized. 

(3) Home —There weren’t any homes, or children, or women 
before Jesus came. The women were playthings. The children 
were just potential men and women, just valued as such and 
not because of their childhood. Home was simply a shelter, 
not a place of tender, healing ministries. 

(4) The Martyrs —There’s no doubt about them. Gibbon 
will tell you more about them and the sources of our informa¬ 
tion concerning them than I have time for. Did they die for 
somebody who never existed? 

(5) Hospitals —There wasn’t one in the world till Jesus 
came. 

(6) Monogamy —There wasn’t any married chastity until 
Jesus came. Read Catherine Mayo’s “Mother India,” or 
Stanley Jones’ “Christ of the Indian Road,” if you want to 
know the difference that Christ makes. If he were not real, 
he wouldn’t make a real difference like that to marriage. 

(7) Christian Experience —There are multitudes of persons 
in the world today who are as sure of the existence of Jesus 
as they are of their own folks. He speaks to them, lives with 
them, helps them daily, hourly; these folk are the salt of the 



138 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


earth. Where did they get their saltness? I don’t mean the 
peppery people: I mean the salty people. 

Those are 7 of my reasons for knowing Christ really came. 
The other 993 reasons are just as important. 


Does Christ’s Divinity Matter? 

QUESTION: Why , considering how liberal you are 
in other respects , do you insist on the Divinity of 
Jesus Christ? 

ANSWER: There comes a point where liberalism must 
cease—a point of finality where a man must at last ground 
and anchor his faith. That point, for the Christian, is in the 
deity, not the mere divinity, of Jesus Christ. I say, the deity, 
because there are a lot of folk playing with language today 
and making divinity mean little, watering it down. I mean the 
deity of Jesus. I mean that he was God’s only begotten Son, 
uniquely and distinctively God in the flesh. 

I don’t care personally about much else as being essential— 
certainly not whether you think the first chapter of Genesis 
is literal history or the last chapter of Revelation exact proph¬ 
ecy. But I cannot get along without my conviction of the 
absolute deity of Jesus—God in the flesh—as John and Paul 
conceived him to be. 

If he was not that, and is thus able to come to our succor 
in all kinds of ways, then he set us an example impossible to 
follow. His death was just a martyrdom, and not even an 
inspiration, if the best man who ever lived died so defeatedly. 
The value of the Cross depends on the nature of him who died 
upon it. We were divorced from God. If he was divine, then, 
the divorce has been rescinded in him. Everything depends on 
that. It is the touchstone and the keystone. That is why I in- 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


139 


sist on that to my own mind and urge it, without dogmatism, 
wherever and whenever I can. 



QUESTION: To what extent have we the right to 
expect our prayers to he answered? 

ANSWER: We have all the rights that children have in 
a home regulated by perfect love and perfect wisdom. I am 
glad you used the plural word “We” instead of the singular 
pronoun “I,” because that is part of the clue to the difficulty. 
Three facts then emerge. The first is that we are children. 
The second is that the home we live in is governed by perfect 
wisdom and perfect love. The third is that we are children in 
a large family. 

Commenting on the third fact first, I want to say that the 
family is large in every way; it is large in its numbers, of 
course, since it includes all life, human and otherwise. But it is 
large in its family existence, covering a multitude of millen¬ 
niums of time. That is what I had in mind when I emphasized 
the fact that you had used the word “We” instead of the 
word “I.” God cannot treat us as if we were isolated from the 
rest of life and from the rest of the human race. 

Our individual desire is not the only consideration that must 
move him. He is thinking of the family as a whole and all the 
time—both as to its numbers and as to the extent of the family 
life through time. So, the prayer must always be, as Jesus 
taught us, in the terms, “Our Father”—not just “My Father.” 
A very large part of the task of prayer—if I may so express it 
—is to bring us into that family consciousness with God and 
the rest of living things; to enable us to sink the purely indi- 



140 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


vidual considerations in the will of the Father and the good 
of the family. 

Returning to the first fact, that we are children, it is neces¬ 
sary to emphasize that, also. Being children there is so much 
we do not know. Our horizon is very limited. Our knowledge 
is very small. Viewed from the large, high, viewpoint, it is 
absurd to attempt to bring the mind of the Father down to 
the limited viewpoints of the child. Somebody pointed out, the 
other day, that we have no memory of extensive landscapes 
beyond and behind our eighth year. Childhood’s physical 
views are limited. In very early childhood, they are limited 
to the under-side of tables and chairs. That is during the 
crawling period. We view everything from the floor level. And 
it is a long while before it becomes much better. You remem¬ 
ber what Tom Hood said— 

“I remember, I remember, 

The fir trees, dark and high; 

I used to think their flowery tops 
Were close against the sky.” 

That being the case, we need to commit the care of our life 
to somebody who lives at a higher level than we do—who has 
a wider perspective. That is why Jesus taught us to pray to 
“Our Father, who art in Heaven.” The word “Heaven”—as 
I think John Ruskin pointed out—is the perfect tense of the 
verb, to heave; to lift up. Christ emphasizes the fact that 
God gazes upon wider horizons and has larger perspectives. In 
the next sentence he emphasizes the fact that the will of that 
Father with the larger horizons as well as the large interests of 
the whole family at heart must be paramount. “Hallowed be 
Thy name” is not just a prayer that we may be kept from blas¬ 
phemous speech. It is a prayer, surely, that God may be 
paramount in his family. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


141 

Those wide horizons of God, that wider perspective, include 
wider horizons of time. He sees what Tennyson calls, 

“That one, far-off, divine event 
To which the whole creation moves.” 

And, incidentally, he sees the winding roads that lead to that 
event. There are temporary goods that lead to ultimate evil. 
As the Book of Proverbs says, “There is a way that seemeth 
right unto a man but the ends thereof are the ways of death.” 

I referred to another consideration. It is that the family of 
which we are a part is governed by perfect wisdom, perfect 
love. We have to presuppose that; though we do not entirely 
have to presuppose that. We have some signs of it, visibly 
before us in our homes, in the love of friends, in the beauty 
of the earth, and the beauty of the sky and especially in the 
revelation which God has made of himself in the Book and in 
his son, Jesus Christ our Lord. 

All these considerations weighing with us—the fact that we 
are part of a family that has interests that cover the whole of 
life, both in this generation and in all generations; that the 
Father’s viewpoint is so much wider than our own, guides 
our right to expect our prayers to be answered, just so far as 
we recognize those facts. 

God will not bring himself down to our limited viewpoint. 
He will not sacrifice the family interests to those of the indi¬ 
vidual and he will not grant us temporary good that might 
prove an eternal evil. If you will say over to yourself the 
Lord’s prayer, with those factors in mind, you will see, 
I think, that it is the perfect expression of prayer for one who 
has those considerations in mind. The great object of prayer 
is not to bring God into unison with our thought and desire, 
but to bring us into line with the Father and the family. 



142 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


Is a Prayer Answered? 

QUESTION: What is God’s most positive promise 
that prayer will he answered? 

ANSWER: That is hard to say because it is a matter of 
individual opinion, there being so many promises. My own 
rule is to accept the statements of Jesus Christ as absolutely 
authoritative in the realm of the spiritual—on the basis that 
“The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, 
he hath revealed him.” 

Accepting that rule, the statements about prayer made by 
Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and contained in Matthew’s 
Gospel, chapters six and seven, are authoritative; so is the 
nth chapter of Luke, which is almost entirely devoted, also, 
to an amplification of what Matthew teaches. 

There is a splendid little book by Harry Emerson Fosdick, 
just large enough for your inside pocket, entitled, “The Mean¬ 
ing of Prayer.” It is very small and very cheap, very modern 
and very devout. 


Prayer and Incurable Disease 

QUESTION: If a person is praying for the recovery 
of someone afflicted with what the doctors consider an 
incurable disease , what answer may one expect from 
such a prayer? 

ANSWER: Well, that question gives a man some loop¬ 
holes, if he wants to take them. What the doctors consider an 
incurable disease is not always incurable, though I have an 
immense respect for doctors. The best doctors will always 
admit of the possibility of error and the limitations of their 
knowledge. But that knowledge becomes less limited every 
year. Until the doctors’ knowledge is absolute, I should always 




TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


143 


feel that I were free to pray in such a case as you describe. 
But it is foolish and, I think, irreverent, to refuse the skill of 
the doctor. Their knowledge is part of God’s revelation of him¬ 
self, just as radio is part of his revelation; I mean, of course, 
the invention of the radio. God and a good doctor always 
work hand in hand and it is foolish to ignore either of them. 

But there are no limits to what prayer can do, within the 
boundaries I have described. We should pray about every¬ 
thing, though always with the great proviso of Christ him¬ 
self, “Thy will be done.” 


Invoking the Saints 

QUESTION: What is your judgment about the 
practice of praying to the saints on the theory that we 
ourselves are too sinful to approach Christ direct? 

ANSWER: I have said before through this microphone 
that I am not very much concerned about the method by which 
we pray, so long as we pray. Prayer is the radio of the spiritual 
realm. It is the means by which distance is eliminated be¬ 
tween scattered souls; souls separated not only by physical 
distance but by differing viewpoints and mutual criticisms. It 
is the means by which all the child souls of the universal family 
are brought into contact, living, healing contact with the great 
Father Spirit of God—the source of all life, unity, love. 

No question of procedure must prevent anybody anywhere 
from exercising that prerogative of all living souls. We cut 
ourselves and each other off from the greatest source of 
strength if, by our objection to some method or other of 
praying, we stop ourselves or others from praying. 

But of course, for myself, I do not believe that praying 
through the saints is the highest form of prayer. That is not 



144 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


criticism but testimony. I think that what we have to insist 
upon for the bringing of all men together is that none is out¬ 
side of Christ, none too far gone or too deeply sunk, to cry 
to him. We are all his younger brethren and nothing that we 
can do, except blaspheming his divine sonship, can break the 
family connection. We have to insist on that. 

Nobody is barred from direct approach to Christ by the fact 
of his sin. Nobody was. The thief on the cross—the woman 
taken in adultery, the woman by the well who had so paltered 
with her womanhood that nobody thought her fit to marry; 
the man who had so abused his body that he was now sick of 
a palsy; not one of these was too sinful, too burdened or un¬ 
worthy to be cut off from direct access to Christ. 

The great fact of his faith is that he is the same, yesterday, 
today and forever. He has not changed. So, we are choosing 
the lower, though we might have the higher contact, 
when we use some of his younger brethren, the saints, for ap¬ 
proach. It is the same with communion with the dead. I think 
that such communion may be possible but I’m not very much 
interested because I know that whether I can have conversa¬ 
tions with the servants of the Great House, or not, I can have 
conversations with the Master of the House himself. Why eat 
in the kitchen when it costs no more of money or labor to eat 
in the dining room? Why talk to the office boy when you might 
be talking with the principal of the firm? But I am not going 
to speak one word of condemnation of anybody who does not 
see it as I do. The big thing is to pray. The method is simply 
a secondary question. 

“Lo, Here; Lo, There” 

QUESTION: In the Lord's Prayer Jesus says, 11 Thy 
kingdom come." Later he says, 11 1 go to prepare a 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


i45 


place for you” In the latter passage , it looks as if 
the kingdom is somewhere else. In the Lord's Prayer 
it looks as if it will be here. Where is the Kingdom? 

ANSWER: The delightful thing about that very intel¬ 
ligent question is that it conies from a girl of thirteen which 
illustrates the fact that boys haven’t all the brains, and that 
men and women haven’t all the brains, either. 

In the Lord’s Prayer, the word Kingdom might be better 
translated “reign.” In the fourteenth chapter of John the word 
place means mansion or resting place. There is nothing in 
either statement to oppose the other. It is just as if General 
Leonard Wood had said about the Philippines, “May the rule 
of America progress and spread here,” and as if also he had 
said, “When this very weary business of representing and 
working for America in the Philippines is over, I am preparing 
a country house in the Adirondacks to retire to.” Neither of 
those statements would be contradictory to the other. 

The kingdom of God is going to be here, in the sense that 
the earth is going to be as heavenly one day as we hope the 
Philippines are going to be American. But, for all that, we 
shall want to go at last to where the king is; just as General 
Wood wanted to be, at last, where his friends are and the form 
of his friend, Roosevelt, lies sleeping. 


Spiritual Toning 

QUESTION: What does the Lord's Prayer mean 
when it prays to God y u Lead us not into temptation? 

ANSWER: You should read in connection with this the 
first verse of the fourth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. Here 
it is, “Then,” (immediately following the wonderful experi- 



146 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


ence of the Baptism in Jordan) “then was Jesus lead up of the 
Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.” 

The Spirit led him into temptation. Nor is it impossible to 
see why. The Baptism was a great approval, by the Father, 
of the years of preparation. The ship has passed inspection, 
so to say, at the hands of the owner. But now, it has to show 
how it can withstand a storm. So it is headed right into the 
gale. 

You remember also the first chapter of Job where God, as if 
proud of his servant, says to Satan, “Hast thou considered 
my servant Job?” As if God said, There is a man for you to 
blunt your teeth upon. I defy you to find a flaw in him. 

That kind of thing may be happening behind the scenes of 
our own life. We may be quite sure that God will never leave 
us in the midst of a test that he himself has permitted. There 
need be no alarm at that thought. But, on the other hand, 
there ought to be nothing of the spirit of venturesomeness or 
bravado. We should be modest and self-distrustful and should 
evidence this in our prayers. 

Peter said, “Though all should forsake thee, yet would I 
never forsake thee.” That was braggart and boastful. Yet, 
Jesus told him that was not the spirit and that, before the 
cock crew, he would be denied by Peter thrice. There are 
your clues for fuller and closer thought. 


Personal Help from Prayer 

QUESTION: Do you get personal help through 
prayer? If so, does it come from without in; or does 
it come from within, out? 

ANSWER: That’s a finely stated question. I am de¬ 
lighted to receive such questions because they indicate deep 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


£47 

and real thought. Here is my answer about myself. I do get 
help from prayer. I get it in various ways. I get it by the fact 
that prayer enables me to attune myself to the divine will and 
purpose. My greatest psychological necessity is to get rid of 
strain and the danger of being hag-ridden by one idea or one 
impulse. Whenever that happens, I know I am not likely to 
think normally. Thought under strain is never sound thought. 
Now prayer enables me to relax my mind, enables me to get 
other angles of thought, and takes the passion out of my think¬ 
ing, which is my own chief danger. 

Now, you ask for my explanation of that. I don’t think my 
explanation is nearly so important as my experience, and my ex¬ 
planation may be a wrong explanation of an undoubted fact— 
just as the fact of the movement of the solar system was known 
to be a fact even when the ancients thought the sun went round 
the earth instead of the earth going round the sun. The ex¬ 
perience was right, but the explanation of the fact was wrong. 

But my explanation of the fact that prayer helps me is, 
first, that I believe that prayer can change the methods of 
God. The materialism with which we are surrounded and— 
I think—impregnated today does not like that and says that 
the purposes of God are age-long and unalterable. But I refuse 
to believe that God is rendered impotent by the laws which he 
has himself created. And in all spiritual matters, matters con¬ 
cerning what God will do and what influences affect him, 
I have come to accept Jesus as the supreme and unquestionable 
authority. The only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the 
Father knows more about that Father than the sublimest 
philosopher in the largest university. And Jesus said that 
prayer could modify the purposes of God. The nth chapter 
of Luke is final on that point. 

But, of course, it is much more important that I should be 
brought to see things from God’s viewpoint than that he 



148 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


should be got to see things from my viewpoint. And that is 
surely the big thing about prayer. It brings us into touch with 
God and so brings us nearer to the place where God is. The 
view of the world we obtain from Calvary is very different 
from the view we obtain from some other hill, say San Juan, 
Cuba, or Bunker Hill. 

So, I think that the answer to your question as to whether 
the help comes from within out, or from without in, is that the 
help is of both kinds. 

Prayer and Paralysis 

QUESTION: I had a stroke over three years ago; 
have prayed with my husband and friends ever since 
but haven't been healed yet . Is it right to keep on 
asking for this healing? 

ANSWER: I have already written my answer to this 
poor, afflicted lady, whose anxiety to know what is the right 
thing to do must be so real. She is paralyzed. Normally, 
there is little hope for radical cure of paralysis; and there is 
distinct danger in anxiety, even concerning the anxiety to get 
well. The normal thing required in such a case is to seek a 
quiet mind, a tranquil spirit. There is wonderful healing 
power for the body in that. I suspect that nine out of 
every ten cases of mental healing are the direct result of the 
therapeutic effect of quietness of spirit. 

I have written that to my afflicted friend, but I have written 
more. I have suggested that she allow her mind to be blessed 
by the knowledge of her husband’s devotion and the warm and 
prayerful friendship of her friends. There is abundant cause 
for rejoicing in that. Let us praise God for the blessings that 
we have. That spirit of praise has also its therapeutic value. 
Ask your doctor. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


149 


About praying to get well. You cannot pray too much, even 
if the prayer is not going to be answered in the exact way you 
wish. Let me suggest that you read two New Testament pas¬ 
sages. The first of them is from the Sermon on the Mount, 
about praying for bread and not getting a stone. That is 
Matthew, chapter 7, verses 7 to 12. God always answers our 
prayers somehow and the “somehow” is always good. But the 
passage I especially want you to read is the Second Epistle 
to the Corinthians, the 12 th chapter, and from the first to the 
twelfth verses. 

That story tells how Paul had a thorn in the flesh, as he 
called it. Some have thought it was blindness. Others have 
thought it was a form of epilepsy. Whatever it was, it was 
a thorn in the flesh. Paul says he prayed to the Lord thrice 
that he would take it away and that, at last, God answered 
him, saying, “My Grace is sufficient for thee.” Think about 
that a great deal. 

Think about it prayerfully because I believe that by prayer, 
God will open its deep meanings to greater depths than I can 
expect to reach. But I believe that Paul ceased from praying 
that the thorn in the flesh might be removed and began to 
pray, instead, that God’s grace might become more and more 
sufficient for him. There is a precious book by Basil King 
called “The Conquest of Fear,” which you should get your 
friends to read to you as they can. 


Trespasses or Debts? 

QUESTION: Which translation do you prefer , 
11 1 or give us our debts as we forgive our debtors ” or , 
11 For give us our trespasses as we forgive those that 
trespass against us?" Why? 



STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


150 


ANSWER: I like the “debts” translation best because 
I think it is what Jesus meant. The Greek word translated 
“trespass” and “debt” is pronounced “amartia.” It is used 
everywhere to express the idea of crossing a line which we 
ought to have walked along—and not across. But I think that 
the use to which the word was put is a little more definite 
than that, though that opens up a big question of scholarship. 

But, anyhow, I’m sure of this, that Jesus meant to include 
the forgiving of debts by Christian people when he spoke of 
trespasses being forgiven. I mean, literal money debts. If you 
doubt that, read the fifth chapter of Matthew, the 38th to the 
42nd verses. I know that sounds hard but I think Jesus meant 
that we are not to sue for debt, if we are Christians. Of 
course, on the other hand, a man cannot be a Christian if he 
does not try, hard and determinedly, to pay his debts. 


The Salvation Army 

QUESTION: What do you think of the Salvation 
Army? 

ANSWER: My admiration for the Salvation Army is al¬ 
most unbounded. I was brought up in far-off England as a 
Methodist of the fourth generation but am glad that, from 
my early years, my parents were interested in and sympathetic 
with the Salvation Army and some of my earliest memories 
are associated with its officers. 

The fine thing about the Salvation Army is that it has pre¬ 
served a sane evangelism when the danger of what I may call 
concentrated evangelism is that it may become hysterical. 
The Salvation Army has been saved from that very destructive 
thing by the fine social service with which its evangelism has 
always been allied, by keeping its feet on the ground. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


£ 5 £ 

The Salvation Army was one of the few religious institu¬ 
tions that came out of the World War with an enhanced repu¬ 
tation. I was in England at that time and know what the 
British Tommy thought of its fine sacrificial service. Since 
coming to America, I have been delighted to find that exactly 
the same fine estimate was made by the American soldiers. 
God bless the Salvation Army. 


Does the Bible Talk About 
Everlasting Life? 

QUESTION: What is the difference between 11 ever¬ 
lasting life ” and 11 eternal life?” 

ANSWER: Jesus never talked about everlasting life. He 
only talked about eternal life. Everlasting life is just what it 
says—everlasting, and, if that is its only feature, worthless. 
Nothing could be so terrible, to my thought, than life that 
went on for ever without a large content. The term “ever¬ 
lasting life” is simply a bad English translation, the old trans¬ 
lators mistaking quantity for quality—a thing that quite a 
number of very modern persons do, in other matters. 

“Eternal life” is not, of necessity, everlasting, though, if it 
is of the right quality, it must be that. The emphasis that 
Jesus put upon whatever idea the men of his time had con¬ 
cerning immortality was upon the quality and content of the 
life that was to continue. “This is life eternal, that they should 
know thee and him whom thou hast sent” (John XVII. 3). 
He defined his mission in John X. 10. “The thief cometh not 
but that he may steal and kill and destroy. I am come that 
they may have life and may have it abundantly.” 

Eternal life does not begin beyond the tomb. It begins just 
as soon as, placing our life in the hands of Christ, we allow 



STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


152 


him to fill it with a new meaning and to endow it with a new 
Godward relationship which makes it invulnerable to the 
effects of death. It goes right on, through the tomb, untouched, 
except with a greater meaning and glory. 

That is where Jesus showed himself to be in such splendid 
contrast with the Greek thought of his time—a thought that 
ran through the civilized world. The Greeks taught that if 
men did live on—they were not very sure about it—they would 
live on as what they themselves called “attenuated shades”— 
thin wisps of men. Jesus said not. Rather would the new 
life, being filled with God, be filled with glory, power—every¬ 
thing virile and good. 


A Point Where Thought Goes Wrong 

QUESTION: What is the difference between in¬ 
spiration and revelation? What I mean is: we speak 
of the Scriptures being the revealed word of God and 
we speak of them as being the inspired word of God. 
Do these expressions mean the same thing? 

ANSWER: They do not. It is because we are prone to 
think they do, that we get into trouble in our thinking about 
the Bible. The difference between them is the difference be¬ 
tween the broadcasting station and your receiving set. Revela¬ 
tion is the sending out of the word of God from the Throne 
of God or the Heart of God. The degree and amount of truth 
varies just as the program sent out from the broadcasting 
station varies. I mean that the amount of truth sent out from 
himself by God to the writer of the Book of Genesis was not 
the same as the amount sent out to Paul, for instance. Revela¬ 
tion concerns the amount of truth sent out. It concerns, so to 
speak, the broadcasting end 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


153 


But inspiration concerns the receiving end. If there is no 
receiving end, there may be all the revelation that God him¬ 
self could give but it would be in vain, just as it would be in 
vain for the broadcasting station—so far as you are concerned 
—to send out air waves unless you have a receiving set. So 
that, just as men may have different power-receiving sets, so 
they may have differing degrees of inspiration. 

The writer of Genesis may have been just as greatly inspired 
as Paul; sufficiently inspired to pick up every syllable of 
revelation from God’s heart. But the revelation was not there. 


A Female Atheist 

QUESTION: I am a woman. I do not believe in 
God. I have had no tragedy in my life to drive me 
from faith. By intellectual means alone , I have just 
come to the conclusion that a personal God does not 
exist. What have you to say to me? 

ANSWER: There are three things I should like to say 
to you, Madam, in the hearing of these folk who are listening 
to me. The first is that I don’t believe you. That sounds 
rude. It may be—but it is not quite so rude as it sounds. 
I mean that while I believe that you think you have come to 
that conclusion about exiling God from his universe, you are 
deceiving yourself if you think you are disbelieving because 
of intellectual reasons. I have met many men who called 
themselves atheists. I have never met a woman atheist. I 
don’t believe they exist. I absolutely refuse to believe that 
you have become an atheist solely for intellectual reasons. 
I think that if I knew some more facts about you, how old you 
are, whether married or single, whether sick or well, happy or 
unhappy—then I could do some guessing. 




154 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


You are an intellectual woman. Then, you know that there 
is nothing more rare than pure intellectualism. Emotion creeps 
in—even when we are unaware of it. Sex creeps in, if we are 
to adopt the findings of Professor Freud—all kinds of inhibi¬ 
tions and complexes arising from sex, from sickness and from 
other influences. There is no such thing as a purely intellectual 
reason. 

Atheism in a woman is the crowning treachery against Jesus 
Christ. He, and nobody else in history, is the originator of 
the emancipation of woman. He became that, because he was 
the Son of God. If God had no Son, then he does not exist. 
The modern woman has no basis for her claims, and no reason 
for her emancipation, apart from Jesus Christ, God’s Son. 
That sounds arrant nonsense. It is sober intellectual fact. 

You ought to read the Literary Review of the Chicago Eve¬ 
ning Post to get my viewpoint. Here is what Susan Wilbur 
said in a review of Gertrude Atherton’s latest book. She is 
speaking of the days of Pericles, in Athens, just about 500 
years before Jesus Christ. “It was a day when to marry for 
love was unknown in Athens, and to love one’s wife, even after 
marriage, somewhat disreputable. Athens was a man’s world, 
and woman was to be seen, neither on the streets nor yet in 
her home should her husband be giving a banquet. If your 
wife proved troublesome, you simply sent her back to her 
spinning wheel, or divorced her, refunding her dowry, of 
course, but keeping the children.” That is a true and not over¬ 
drawn picture. Indeed, matters were much worse than that 
and impossible to describe. And that was in the days of Peri¬ 
cles, the highest, richest days of the greatest and most enlight¬ 
ened pagan nation the world has ever seen, as every intellec¬ 
tual woman knows. To get a picture of woman’s world in 
pagan times, you must go to some highly civilized pagan land 
of today, like China. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


£55 

It was Jesus Christ—Christ who was Mary’s son, and the 
friend of Mary Magdalene, who enshrined womanhood in our 
hearts as something sacred for its own wonderful, sacrificial 
and uplifting sake. Immediately the Christian story reaches 
any country and immediately the Christian impulse gets into 
the hearts of the men of that country, the first change is in 
the status of woman. That is taking place in China right now 
—as in India. Jesus is the cause of the enfranchisement of 
woman in every century and in every country. To deny the 
existence of His Father is the crowning act of treachery by 
woman against Jesus Christ. 

Atheism is the most dreadful foe of womanhood. Let 
atheism among men or women grow and there won’t be much 
left of the modern and I suppose precious freedom of woman. 
Chastity will disappear from the earth. Our respect for woman 
will die like the flowers before the frost’s first onslaught. You 
know what Paul said, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow 
we die.” There won’t be any reason for cleanness, chastity, 
reverence of womanhood, if God goes and takes “tomorrow” 
with him. I mean that if God goes, immortality goes, too, and 
the great big reason for being pure and being good is gone 
with it. Irreligious days are always profligate days and profli¬ 
gate days are always terrible for woman. 

Faith Is Dynamic 

QUESTION: Do you think there is any virtue or 
value in believing apart from its object? I mean would 
it still be worth while to believe , even if there were some 
doubt about the object of belief — say , the existence 
of God? 

ANSWER: I certainly do. Robert Browning, in his won¬ 
derful but difficult poem, “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” says 



STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


156 


that faith is always fire and doubt is always ice. That may 
not be the exact wording of it, but it is the sense of what he 
says and the sense is very sensible. 

If I give you aviation as an instance, you will be able to 
apply the illustration to everything else. H. G. Wells published 
a book just after the war in which he pointed out that as 
recently as 1913, the scientific people—always supposed to be 
infallible—seriously discussed whether men would be able to 
fly—as soon before the war as 1913. Well, there were a few 
fools around them who refused to be convinced by these scien¬ 
tific skeptics. Some of them broke their necks and others 
their bank accounts. But it is to these fanatical believers that 
we owe the probability of being able to visit England before 
I am dead, within two sunsets. We certainly do not owe it to 
lie skeptics. Fancy a man flying in those first machines who 
was certain that the blessed thing would never leave the ground 
and, if it did, it would never come down again. It was the 
believer, before there was much to believe in, who just made 
the wheels go round, as your own thinking over the history 
of inventions, and of progress, will tell you. 

Then, Browning goes on to say that belief is always con¬ 
structive and disbelief always destructive. Apart altogether 
from the religious question, St. Francis or Luther did more 
for the energizing of civilization than, for instance, Voltaire 
or Renan. Faith itself, apart from its object, is a wonderful 
dynamic for civilization. Any fool can push a wall down. It 
takes activity and long continued energy to put a wall up. 
That is apart altogether from direct goal and object of faith 
which, as I understand, you wished me to ignore for the pur¬ 
poses of this question. 

Just as I had finished preparing my answer to that ques¬ 
tion, I read a fine quotation in an English newspaper. Let me 
read it to you: 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


157 


“We can always retain our beliefs so long as we retain our 
feeling. This is the touchstone of belief. Those who feel 
strongly, believe. Lose your feelings and you become, as the 
phrase is, disillusioned. Then comes the gray desolation, the 
emptiness, the arid, meaningless vacuity which is the tragedy 
that accompanies all disbelief. It is the ignoble surrender to 
death in life.” 

Creed or Christ? 

QUESTION: Do you think a man has to believe all 
that the Creed says in order to be a good Christian? 

ANSWER: I do not. I think that a man has to believe in 
Jesus Christ—not in the Creed—in order to be a Christian. 
But even that simple statement needs qualifying because the 
word “belief” means so many different things to different 
minds. 

For instance, a man may say, “I believe in my wife” and 
mean a very different thing from when he says, “I believe in 
God.” All that he may mean by believing in God is that he 
believes that God exists. But he does not only mean that he 
believes that his wife exists when he says that he believes in 
his wife. He believes in his wife’s trustworthiness and in her 
devotion. 

Now, I think that it is that kind of belief that Jesus wants 
and I believe that if a man has that kind of belief—the kind 
that believes that Jesus is absolutely devoted to him, is abso¬ 
lutely worthy of his confidence—the other kind of belief in the 
things that the Creed says about Jesus will come. 

I am sure that once we come to believe that Jesus is worth 
believing in for his own sake, we shall come to find that the 
rest of the teaching of the Creed about him will be proven to 
be true. 



158 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


Is the Bible Infallible? 

QUESTION: Would not our religious world be 
relieved of a dead load if we could , in some way, or 
other , get rid of the idea that the Bible is the infallible 
word of God? 

ANSWER: I am going to give time to this question be¬ 
cause it is one of the really practical kind, expressed in a 
lengthy letter very ably and clearly, and probably articulating 
the thoughts of many thousands besides the asker of it. Let 
me, first of all, read some of the letter, which runs to seven 
pages, though not to a page too many. Here are the extracts: 

“There is a real problem for that increasing multitude of us 
who are unable to conform our intellectual content with that 
which the church prescribes, and which many Christian people 
seem to easily accept. To be happily environed ecclesiastically, 
one’s spiritual and intellectual life should function freely, 
openly and concurrently. Both spiritual and mental life should 
have ample freedom of self-expression. The church and per¬ 
haps other organized institutions—but the church particu¬ 
larly—repress the intellect. In the realm of science, discovery 
and invention, there doesn’t seem to be any desire to impose 
inhibitions upon intellectual ventures, but in religion, the 
church, in most instances, virtually fixes the type of one’s 
thinking, the content of the religious mind. 

“On this ground, I have, most of my life, found myself 
unable to enjoy, fully, my church life. This problem, to me 
a serious one, has its base in a fallacy. This fallacy consists 
of the ideal held for many centuries that the Bible is the in¬ 
spired, unerring word of God. The doctrine of inspiration and 
infallibility has made the Bible into something that it is not. 
Would it not make us a happier religious world if we were 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


iS9 


allowed to accept and interpret the Bible on the basis of what 
it really is, a collection of ancient religious literature, a product 
of the mentality current in that old world? In this literature, 
they recorded their beliefs, their superstitions, their inspira¬ 
tions and aspirations, their joys and sorrows, their failures and 
successes, their faith in God and hopes for the future. 

“For my own part, when I read the Bible, I do it without 
putting my intellect through the torture and into inconvenient 
attitudes. I read the Bible more appreciatively and under- 
standingly, even as a mere layman, than I ever could during 
the early years when I struggled with the old idea of inspira¬ 
tion and infallibility.” 

My friend, in his thinking, does not discriminate sufficiently 
between the churches and the church. Individual churches 
are not the church, which is the great body of Christian people. 
Now, the church has never defined a doctrine of inspiration. 
I want to insist upon that. It has never said, “This is what we 
understand by inspiration, and this is not inspiration.” That 
of course, includes Scriptural infallibility. That being the 
case, it is wrong to say that the church has, generally or offi¬ 
cially, dogmatized about the matter at all. Individual Chris¬ 
tians have. So have groups of Christians. But the church as 
a whole never has. That is important. It is as important as 
blaming a whole school for the foolish or criminal act of one 
pupil, or even of one master. But the church has insisted that 
the Bible is the inspired word of God, even if it has not 
defined how it is so. 

My friend admits, for my purpose and to my thinking, at 
least, that the Bible is inspired. Else why does he read it? 
Not merely because it is the collection of ancient records that 
he speaks of it as being. The Hindu Vedas, the Uparnishads 
of India, are also available. They are quite as ancient, are quite 
as much records of ancient faiths of by-gone ages. There must 



i6o 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


be another reason, which my friend would, I am sure, be willing 
to gladly admit. There is something in this book that is not 
to be found in other books to the same degree. It answers 
some longing, some hunger. That, to me, is inspiration. 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge expressed it when he said, “The 
Bible finds me.” It gets down below the veneers in which I 
cover myself, shows me as myself, and that is what I mean 
by inspiration. When Oliver Cromwell had his portrait 
painted by Sir Peter Lely, he said, “Warts and all, Lely,—warts 
and all.” That is the kind of portrait that the Bible shows me 
of myself. That is inspiration. 

But my friend will admit something else. The Old Testa¬ 
ment, in particular, is, as he says, chiefly a collection of ancient 
records. But they are records of struggle of all kinds. Gener¬ 
ally, it is an ineffective struggle, until toward its end, it begins 
to speak as if the unaided struggle were too much, as if some¬ 
body must come and rescue the battle from the enemy if it is 
to be won. Then, there begins to emerge a hope that such a 
rescuer will come. It becomes a promise. 

Now, I ask my friend to consider this: it was not the Chris¬ 
tian Church that made the selection of the books of the Old 
Testament, containing these stories of struggle against the 
lower man within us, nor the Christian Church that selected 
these promises of this coming rescuer from the mass of other 
similar literature that lay around. If we had compiled the 
canon of the Old Testament, the charge would have been 
made that we had selected only such books for that Testament 
as suited our purpose. The significance of that ought to be 
clear. There must, surely, have been some presiding and benefi¬ 
cent mind guiding these things. That is what we mean by in¬ 
spiration, not as a doctrine but as an obvious fact of history. 

Now, we come to the New Testament. What is the signifi¬ 
cant thing about it? Surely, it is this, that it contains a unique 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


161 


portrait—a portrait that has never been excelled for beauty or 
winsomeness. Men do fall in love with that portrait. That is 
unquestionable. My friend has, though he does not say so; 
and the striking thing is that whenever men fall in love with it, 
they are better men. Now, what is inspiration, anyway? Surely, 
in some sense, that need not be defined. I, for one, refuse to 
define it lest I be accused of trying to narrow something that 
is as broad as God’s Heaven. Surely, inspiration, whatever 
else it is or is not, is an inrush of the divine into this human 
life of ours; a beam shooting through our thunder clouds. If 
it is anyhow possible for God to do this, it is everyhow possible 
for him to do this. 

Inspiration includes the incarnation of Jesus Christ, our 
Lord. And wherever he goes, wherever that portrait is shown, 
there is apparent a difference in men and in their reactions to 
the facts of life. My friend refers in one part of his letter to 
the outworn stories of demon possession. But why are they out¬ 
worn? Dr. Glover of Cambridge, England, has written some 
wonderful books which would delight my friend for their 
liberalness. In one of them, Dr. Glover points out that 
wherever Christ was known, in the first ages of the church, the 
fear of demons disappeared. That is still true. The pagan 
world today is still hag-ridden and terrified by the fear of 
demons. Where Jesus is known, that fear disappears. That 
being the case, and it seems indisputable—I don’t care what is 
the explanation of the story of the Gadarene swine. That is 
trivial, compared with the total effect of Jesus on the world- 
fear of demons. That is the big thing. 


Why God Created the World 

QUESTION: What was God's purpose in creating 
the world? 



i 62 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


ANSWER: That is not an easy question and I may not 
be able to shed any light on it at all. I do not know how much 
is in my questioner’s mind as he asks it and what, particularly, 
he is groping after. But the old definitions of God made the 
creation of the world unnecessary. That is to say, if God is 
infinite in every sense, then he is self-sufficient and needed 
nothing besides himself. 

But, as I said last Sunday, I am sure that we shall get a dif¬ 
ferent viewpoint of God if we go to Jesus Christ for our 
definitions. He was content to give just one definition and it 
has a very close bearing on your question. He said that God 
is Father just as the man who knew Christ best said that God 
is love. 

A father must have a child. A lover must have a beloved. 
The world is the answer of God, the lover, to his own need of 
something responsive to his need for love. Such a God as 
Christ revealed could not live in a vacuum, so to speak, and 
continue to be God. 

That is the big part of the answer. Another part of it is this. 
Life is not static. It is dynamic. It is active, creative, opera¬ 
tive. It has to do something to prove it is alive and to prove 
that to itself. God is alive and the very essence of life. That 
being so, he had to be creative. 

So, if you like, the creation of the world is an answer to his 
own twofold craving. It answers the dynamic craving of his 
nature to do something. And it answers the craving of his 
heart for an object of his love. 


Is Capital Punishment Christian? 

QUESTION: Does the teaching of the New Testa¬ 
ment support capital punishment of whatever kind? 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


163 


ANSWER: I can see myself getting into trouble with 
some of these questions, but I am bound to answer honestly 
that the Sermon on the Mount is contrary to the teaching that 
capital punishment implies. Capital punishment is an outcrop¬ 
ping of the teaching of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a 
tooth. The Sermon on the Mount abrogates that. 

But before you treat that as a final and conclusive answer, 
you have to decide something much more important. Did 
Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, lay down a new principle 
for human society or did he simply give a new order to his own 
disciples, living in human society? The German scholar Weis- 
aker says that it was the latter, and not the former, but, of 
course, there is ground for a lot of discussion there. Person¬ 
ally, I should not be able to vote for any form of capital 
punishment, thinking that it would be a personal violation 
by me of the teaching of Jesus for me. But every man must 
settle that for himself. 


When Did They Begin To Write the 
New Testament? 

QUESTION: How and by whom, was Christianity 
carried down from the time of Christ until the Bible 
was written? 

ANSWER: Jesus was crucified somewhere between 
A. D. 30 and A. D. 35. Scholars are agreed that the Gospel of 
Mark was written not later than A. D. 66, while St. Paul was 
yet alive, as the Alexandrine Fathers say. Peter died before 
Paul. Thus Mark and, I think, Luke, all Paul’s Epistles, 
and James’ Epistle were written within thirty-three years of the 
ascension of Jesus Christ. Many of the books were written 
before that, so that the whole of the New Testament was 



164 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


written either by Apostles or what are called Apostolic men, 
men like Timothy and Mark, the companions of the Apostles. 

Your question seems to suggest that you thought there was 
a long interval between the death of Christ and the beginning 
of the New Testament. There was no such interval. Perhaps 
the Epistles to the Thessalonians were written within fifteen 
years of that death. The church was carried on by the Apostles 
themselves and before the last of them died, the whole, or 
most of the New Testament was written. 

The last writer to die was St. John, who wrote the Gospel, 
the three epistles and, perhaps, the Revelation. He had a 
disciple named Polycarp. We know that he was young when 
John died and that Polycarp died in A. D. 146. That makes 
the interval between the completion of the New Testament and 
the death of Christ very short. 

I believe there were fragments of the words of Jesus in 
existence in the early church within five years of the Ascen¬ 
sion, and perhaps earlier than that. Some of them, called the 
Logia, are incorporated in St. Matthew’s Gospel. So there was 
practically no interval between the Ascension and the first 
committal of the words of Jesus to writing. 


An Unfaithful Wife 

QUESTION: I have discovered my wife to he un 
faithful to me. I have been a listener to you for many 
months and have learned to trust your advice. Tell 
me what I ought to do with her. Whatever it is t I 
will try to do it. 

ANSWER: It is a very great privilege but a very dread¬ 
ful responsibility to answer a question like that. If, as I under¬ 
stand to be the case, this is the first time you have had reason 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


165 


to think your wife has failed you, then I am sure you have 
to forgive her. You tell me that you are a Christian man. It 
is your very plain but very difficult Christian duty to do that. 

But something must be done as a mere matter of prudence. 
You have to tell your wife that you know she has been dis¬ 
loyal. There is not to be any bullying or raving and it would 
be better if she could somehow be persuaded to tell you of her 
own accord. It would be less humiliating to her and much 
less likely to cause her a feeling of subsequent anger against 
herself or you, if she could do this. 

But that you will have to work out for yourself. What I 
am insisting on is the absolute necessity for your own soul’s 
sake that you forgive her. There are all sorts of facts to 
make it easier for you to do this most difficult thing. One is 
the strange and treacherous nature of our own being. Sex is 
among the most inexplicable things in the world, with strange, 
underground passages leading to all kinds of dark and difficult 
places. In ways that I cannot point out to you here, you may 
yourself be innocently to blame for her failing to some extent. 
In your own heart, you may find some extenuating circum¬ 
stances for her. I do not know. 

But the great big reason for forgiveness is that God for¬ 
gives us worse faults than adultery. There is help, somewhere 
in the Bible, for every circumstance. It happens that there 
is exactly the help you need in the first three chapters of the 
prophet Hosea. He married a wife who was unfaithful to 
him. He spoke to God about it and God told him to woo her 
back again, making quite sure that he won her heart all over 
again. Then, he was to take her back. 

He did that, and when he had done it, God told him that 
what had happened between his wife and himself was exactly 
what was happening between God’s people and their God. 
They were adulterously seeking other interests than his. They 



i66 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


were going back on him who had loved them with an ever¬ 
lasting love. It’s all in the first three or four chapters of Hosea 
and I beg you to read it for your help and strength in this 
dark hour. 


Pre-nuptial Unchastity 

QUESTION: There is a man who wants to marry 
me. He thinks me altogether chaste and good , hut 
this has not always been so. The other man is dead. 
Do you think I ought to tell my future husband of 
my past? 

ANSWER: No, I do not, in the circumstances you have 
named. If the other man had been alive I think I should 
have given different advice. But even then, I am not sure. 
Our human nature is strangely constituted and while we can 
perform exalted acts of forgiveness in exalted moments, some¬ 
times, when some cloud comes across our sky, we almost repent 
our own forgiving spirit, and sometimes even hark back to the 
magnanimity that we showed in our more generous mood, and 
destroy the effect of our magnanimity by referring to it. 

If you have been entirely faithful to your finance, who you 
say you love very dearly, say nothing. Give him the future, 
utterly and entirely. The past does not belong to him. Some 
will criticize this advice of mine but it is the best I have to 
give you in this practical world. Stick to it. 


Don’t! 


QUESTION: The gentleman to whom I am engaged 
to be married is a member of a church whose name I 
have given you in the accompanying letter. He 




TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


167 


insists that I accompany him to his church when 
married. We have rather fussing discussions about 
this and I am a little concerned for the future. Will 
you kindly give me your advice? 

ANSWER: My advice is, Don’t marry him. I’m sure a 
marriage begun in the spirit you describe will end in a spirit 
of much greater controversy. If you both fail to love each 
other enough for either of you to be willing to join the other’s 
church, you should not marry. There is a saying in the New 
Testament which goes like this, “If they do these things in 
the green leaf, what will they do in the dry?” And if you two 
folk are arguing about who is to do the surrendering now, 
when the glamour is at its greatest, what will your arguments 
be like when the routine of life begins to get you? 

If nothing will content him but that you go to his church, 
he isn’t worth marrying. If nothing will content you but he 
must go to yours, I’m not sure that you are any better than 
he is. Anyhow, argument that fusses you both is too bad a 
beginning to let me prophesy a good end to it. 


Did a Woman Write the Epistle to 
the Hebrews? 

QUESTION: On what do you base your thought that 
the Epistle to the Hebrews was not written by Saint 
Paul? I heard you state this as your opinion but 
you did not give your reasons? 

ANSWER: I had given my reasons a few Sundays prev¬ 
iously. Let me give them again. (1) Nowhere in the epistle 
is Paul or anybody else stated to be the writer. That leaves 
the question open for free conjecture and discussion. 



STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


168 


(2) The epistle speaks of Timothy our brother. “Our 
brother!” Everywhere else in epistles that are undoubtedly 
Paul’s, he is either spoken of as “our fellow helper” or as 
“my son.” That looks as if the writer belongs to a rank 
secondary to the Apostles, if I may put it like that, rather 
than to the Apostolic group. 

(3) More important and more impressive to anybody who 
reads a solitary chapter of the epistle, even in the English, 
is a very notable difference in literary style. Paul is argu¬ 
mentative, but severely logical, wherever logic will serve him. 
The epistle to the Hebrews, on the other hand is intuitive, al¬ 
most poetical. That is why Harnack suggests that it was 
written by a woman, probably by Priscilla, the wife of Aquilla, 
the couple who taught Apollus, that man in Corinth who was 
so mighty in the Scriptures—meaning, the Old Testament 
Scriptures. That brings me to 

(4) Which notes another surprising difference between the 
style of Hebrews and Paul’s writings. I mean that Hebrews 
never ceases from quoting the Old Testament. You find the 
quotations, not on every page merely, but in every column. 
They are always quotations from the Greek translation of the 
Old Testament, known as the Septuagint, which indicates that 
it was a Greek Jew who used them; another indication that 
either Priscilla, Aquilla or Apollos or somebody of that Greek 
speaking circle, were the writers or writer. Each of these 
has been suggested as the author. 

(5) Most impressive is the vocabulary. Paul had his own 
vocabulary, just as every man has. It was so distinctive that 
a Greek New Testament scholar, without knowing from what 
he was reading, would recognize Paul’s style just as an English 
scholar would recognize Stevenson’s style or Hardy’s. Now, 
apart from hundreds of different sentence forms that Hebrews 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


169 


use, there are 169 words in Hebrews that Paul never uses at 
all—not once in all his epistles. That seems conclusive. 

You can get a very full and delightfully interesting treatise 
on the whole subject from Bishop Westcott’s introduction to 
his commentary on the epistle. The “Britannica” will also 
have an article on it that is sure to be authoritative, though 
it is a long while since I read it. 


Who Are the 144,000? 

QUESTION: Who are the 144,000 redeemed from 
amongst men? 

ANSWER: The reference is to Revelation, chapter VII 
and verse 4 and to chapter XIV and verses 1 and 3. The 
number is purely allegorical. It certainly does not mean that 
that is the total number of the redeemed. Else the chapter VII 
containing that glorious passage about the great company that 
no man could number which comforts us so much in our be¬ 
reavement—that passage would contradict it. 

The Jews—of whom St. John, author of the Book of the 
Revelation was one—were very fond of allegory. The perse¬ 
cuting time in which he lived made it necessary for him some¬ 
times to use secret symbols and ciphers. I think that the 
number 144,000 is one of those mystic symbols of which we 
have lost the key. Dr. Swete, the greatest expositor of the 
Book of the Revelation, thinks that the number refers to the 
selected representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel—12 
times 12,000. 

But I’m sure we do ourselves and Jesus Christ a great wrong 
if we limit the number of the redeemed to that figure. If we 
limit him in any way, we get like the old Scotch woman who 
was asked by her minister who she thought would finally reach 



STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


170 


Heaven. She said, “Weel, there’ll be me”—she was quite sure 
about that, for she repeated it. “There’ll be me”—and then 
not quite so positively, “There’ll be my husband, John.” “Nay, 
nay,” she said presently, “I wouldn’t be say sure about John.” 
Let’s keep the number of the redeemed as large as we can. 


Teach Sex Facts Early 

QUESTION: At what age should the teaching of sex 
be begun and how completely should its facts be ex - 
plained to the youth of our homes? 

ANSWER: The teaching of sex should begin when a 
child is aged two or sooner; to the extent of getting that child 
to admire the hatching and care of eggs by the mother bird; 
later, coming to the beauty and biological use of flowers. 

How soon the facts of sex as they relate to our human life 
should be taught must be left to each individual parent but I 
am sure that the average parent is mistaken in thinking that 
boys and girls have not picked up a lot of very slimy knowl¬ 
edge before they are twelve. 

All the facts of sex should be taught to a boy or girl by 
the sixteenth year, probably much before then. I cannot say 
that strongly enough. After thirty years of ministry, some 
of them very closely connected indeed with the wrecks and 
ruins of our young manhood and womanhood, I have the 
utmost confidence in saying that more have been ruined by a 
kind of half-knowledge—just having had a part of the story 
told them, until they think they know it all—than by knowl¬ 
edge of the completest sort. I would tell everybody every¬ 
thing—everything. It’s the only safe course. The difficulty is 
that parents think they have told everything when they have 
only stammered and stuttered their way through a jargon of 




TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


111 

suggestions, assuming that they have conveyed more than 
they really have. 

That raises the very difficult question of who should do the 
telling. You have to be on mighty good terms with a boy or 
girl to do it properly; on better—or, at any rate, on closer— 
terms than the average parent is nowadays. And whoever does 
it must be quite sure that what they tell are facts and not just 
imagined facts. 

Prohibition 

QUESTION: There is much discussion regarding 
the stand one should take on the Prohibition question . 
By the time everybody has given his opinion , I do not 
know what to think . Will you tell me what should 
be the attitude of the intelligent young American on 
Prohibition? 

ANSWER: What you call Prohibition happens to be a 
Federal law. It is a fundamental principle of civilized gov¬ 
ernment that laws should be kept, whatever they are. If we 
pick and choose amongst laws, there is an end of civilization. 
According to William Roscoe Thayer, this question was put to 
Theodore Roosevelt about something else and Roosevelt 
answered, “Keep the law. Enforce the law. If it’s a good 
law, it ought to be enforced, anyway. If it’s a bad law, its 
enforcement will reveal its badness more quickly than any¬ 
thing else. ,, I stand by Theodore Roosevelt. 

Prohibition is an experiment, not a very successful one thus 
far, but good in its intention and purpose. The experiment 
will not be tested by ignoring it. Whatever young Americans 
should or should not stand for, it is their plain duty to their 
country to enforce the laws of their country. At the same 



172 


STRAIGHt ANSWERS 


time they should reserve to themselves the right, which be¬ 
longs to every free-born man, to legitimately work for the 
repeal of any law which they believe works hardships or 
injustice on any considerable proportion of the people. 


Should the Church Be Responsible 
for Community Amusements? 

QUESTION: Do you think that the Church should 
he responsible for all community amusements? 

ANSWER: My own opinion, for what it is worth is, No. 
The church has been the educator and developer of the com¬ 
munity in the matter of amusements; the drama for instance 
being the child of the Church, unmistakably. The old miracle 
plays and morality plays of the middle ages were distinct 
church activities. It was the Church that created the theatre. 
Then, gradually, and as I think, wisely, the Church handed over 
the theatre to its own devices except that it continued and 
continues to keep a watchful and solicitous eye on its morali¬ 
ties—as it has the right to do with its own child. 

That, in my own judgment should be the attitude of the 
Church toward all the amusements of the people and towards 
many other things. The business of the Church—amongst other 
tasks—is to provide a fully rounded life for the people. If 
it is not provided by other agencies, then the Church may step 
into the breach, but not otherwise. It is never the Church’s 
business to do things that other organizations can do better. 

So, in a perfectly organized community, the Church can 
leave the amusements of the people alone, except in a supervis¬ 
ing way; but in a community that is only organized more or 
less, the Church should step into the gap as a temporary 
measure. 




TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


173 


Racial Pigmentation 

QUESTION: How did the various races , white , 
yellow , and black , JAeir color? 

ANSWER: Some of the very oldest of the Old Testa¬ 
ment stories are attempts of the early peoples to explain these 
things, religiously and politically. Thus, there is a story in 
the ninth chapter of Genesis explaining the different racial 
histories and their relative economic and political importance. 

But, there are other explanations, more kindly and more 
scientific. They are of course evolutionary and therefore des¬ 
pised amongst some Christians, but they are the more scientific 
and I accept them for that reason. 

Under the law of the survival of the fittest, the race with 
the strongest brain-pan and the greatest amount of pigmenta¬ 
tion best resisted the terrible onslaughts of the tropical sun. 
At the same time, that influence of the sun made itself felt by 
still strengthening the brain-pan and deepening the pigmenta¬ 
tion. The colored man, whether yellow or black, tends to 
lose his color in the temperate zones, though, of course, as 
millenniums were needed to acquire his characteristics, so mill¬ 
enniums will be required to remove them. The sons of English¬ 
men born in India are more swarthy than their fathers and 
the sons of Hindus born in England are less swarthy than 
their fathers. 


Conversion and Church Membership 

QUESTION: Can a man who is converted be a 
Christian without becoming a church member? 

ANSWER: I’m sure I hope so. Else, the majority of 
men are in a bad way. It is just as possible for a man to be a 



174 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


Christian without being a church member as it is for a man 
to be a church member without being a Christian. But I 
think that a man who wants, sincerely, to follow Christ should 
join a church. It is good for the man. Our lonely battles and 
pilgrimages are most often losing battles and pilgrimages. We 
march and fight best in companies—as I have often said. 

Then, it is good for the church to have in it those who are 
in the first flush of their new enthusiasms. We other folk 
get dreadfully stodgy and podgy in our religion. It be¬ 
comes cold and formal and political, losing its warm enthu¬ 
siasm and generosity. The churches should have plenty of en¬ 
thusiastic youth in them and plenty of redeemed Magdalenes 
and Zaccheuses. One of the reasons why the churches are so 
lifeless today is that the sinners in them—and there are quite 
a number—are what our fathers used to call “Gospel-hardened 
sinners” who have been there so long that they have come to 
think they are saints. 


Should Youth Be Allowed to Develop 
Its Own Destiny? 

QUESTION: A father has a son who is very bright 
and who seems to have a strongly developed musical 
faculty , as well as a great deal of ability with radio 
sets . He is in demand at hotels and dance halls . 
Is this the path for a Christian lad to tread? 

ANSWER: Why, of course, if it really is the path of in¬ 
clination and ability. It appears that the lad has had fine 
home training to which he has responded favorably. It is a 
wrong view of life which holds that it is easier to be a Christian 
in a monastic cell than in a radio studio or in a hotel orchestra. 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


175 


Most of my time is spent in a pastor’s study and that’s a 
terribly wicked place, sometimes. You’ve no idea. While, on 
the other hand, I’ve met men in radio studios who would put 
some ministers to the blush for the integrity of their lives and 
the helpfulness of their influence. 

Of course, the life decisions we make at 18 are not always 
permanent and there is perhaps a certain glamour about this 
broadcasting profession which we lose as we grow older. It’s 
terribly hard work, exhausting to the nerves, offers little exer¬ 
cise, is filled with all kinds of disappointments. Still, my own 
view is that it is offering every day, greater opportunities for 
real human service. 

Gentle him along. Don’t forbid and don’t hurry him along 
any path. The vision may change. If it doesn’t however, 
there is going to be no harm to your boy in choosing any 
honorable profession. 


Does the Crime or Its Punishment 



QUESTION: Do you think the electrocution of 
Mrs . Ruth Snyder is any more of a disgrace for her 
daughter , Loraine ) than the fact that her mother was 
guilty of murdering the child's father? 

ANSWER: That question seems to me one of the best 
and most significant that has reached me in a long while. It 
throws the spot-light on the folly of a lot of our sentimental 
modern thinking. The atrocity of the crime of which Mrs. 
Snyder was declared guilty is beyond description. Yet there 
is a large section of opinion, in this thought of the effect of 
these things upon the career of the child, which imagines that 



176 


STRAIGHT ANSWERS 


the burden that the child will have to carry through life is the 
fact that her mother expiated that crime. 

That should be a solace to the child’s mind, and would be 
in a Society that thought these things through. In such a 
Society the child would be taught to think that by the price 
her mother had paid for her crime she had to some degree 
cancelled the debt she owed Society. The real burden is not 
that her mother paid the forfeit of her life but that she was 
such a mother as could commit such a crime. That is the 
haunting thing; and I trust your question will do something 
to assist us to remove that Beatitude from our thinking which 
reads, “Blessed is he—or she—who is not found out.” 


The Modern Youth 

QUESTION: In studying the present activities of 
us boys and girls in home , school , churchy and com¬ 
munity, what are the most pressing problems we 
face in learning to be Christians? 

ANSWER: I think the vast majority of the boys and 
girls of this generation are making a magnificent fight of 
it—a fight to assimilate knowledge and new ideas that their 
fathers and mothers hardly knew existed, and amid surroundings 
as different from those we met as adolescents as chalk is from 
cheese. As I have said, the majority are winning out in a 
magnificent way. 

Here is one man’s answer to a boy’s question. Live as if 
God lived and live as if he were your father instead of your 
private and unseen policeman. Then, in your relations to 
sexual problems think of Tennyson’s great line, “Reverencing 
each and each self-reverencing.” Then think of another line 
of Tennyson’s, “Reverencing your conscience as your king.” 



TO LIFE QUESTIONS 


177 


That’s about all. Keep your body clean, inside and out. Read 
Robert Louis Stevenson and not Theodore Dreiser. Read 
Mark’s Gospel. Learn to play fair and don’t bother too much 
about winning by any other means than fair means. Learn 
to use your fists instead of a gun. Avoid all kinds of bottles 
and especially flasks, and get the clean collar habit. One 
other thing—your mother’s church is good enough for you if 
it was good enough for your mother, though you can make it 
better. 













































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